Organized labor registers its dissatisfaction with the healthcare reform law, stopping just short of calling for its repeal. Meanwhile, as some large employers announce benefits cuts, there's reason to believe they may be outliers.
What's the question employees most want answered about the PPACA?
Bankrate has been taking monthly Health Insurance Pulse surveys, asking questions to measure how consumers are feeling about the health law, their own healthcare, and health insurance. Twenty-eight percent of respondents, the largest group, want to know how it will affect their current health coverage.
'The answer to that depends on where they work and whether or not they belong to a union.
Organized Labor Hates Obamacare
At the AFL CIO annual conference in Las Vegas last week, labor leaders stopped just short of calling for a repeal the law.
Their beef? Union leaders want labor's plans to be included in the health insurance marketplace. They also want members enrolled in union health plans to be offered cost reduction options such as the PPACA exchange subsidies.
As the healthcare reform law stands today, health insurance exchanges (marketplaces) do not offer subsidies to union members' multi-employer health plans'.
These multi-employer health plans, which were treated like employer-based plans under the tax code, are now more expensive and offer less coverage than plans on the PPACA's exchanges. Union leaders say this weakens their membership and position in the business community.
"In a letter from the Treasury Department released Friday evening, the Obama administration said it is willing to work with unions to modify their health plans to meet the exchange standards, and therefore qualify members to receive subsidies.
Large Employers Unlikely to Drop Health Benefits
With stories coming out nearly weekly about major employers dropping spouse coverage or medical coverage for retirees (most recently GE, IBM, UPS, Delta Airlines), it's no surprise that American workers are increasingly concerned about their benefits eroding . What they don't know is that most large employers aren't likely to make dramatic shifts right away.
An article in Health Affairs last week explored the likelihood that employers will drop health insurance coverage.
"Rates of employer-sponsored coverage are driven by the business case for benefits for the firm's workers," write the authors. The business case for offering health benefits include:
- Employer-based plans are already subsidized since they are not subject to federal, state income taxes or the Social Security payroll tax.
- Employees already pay for health insurance through lower wages, and employers prefer to keep total compensation constant.
- Employer-based health plans typically reflect the preferences of the employees, and tailoring health plan preference for each worker adds up a large administrative cost.
Although it will be 2015 before we can determine the real effects of the employer mandate, the authors of the report concluded that reports by the Congressional Budget Office, the RAND Corp., the Urban Institute, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are correct in determining there will be "relatively small declines" in employer-based coverage as a result of the PPACA.
Chelsea Rice is an associate editor for HealthLeaders Media.
