Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Obamacare: Driving Up Costs And Driving Down Those Insured
Obamacare: Driving Up Costs And Driving Down Those Insured
Dec 12, 2025 5:30 PM

Delta Airlines has announced that it foresees a spike in health care costs for pany to the tune of $100 million a year. A Delta executive, Robert Kight, has said that fees associated with Obamacare will be costly, but won’t likely be more beneficial than what pany’s employees now have.

One of the costly items pertains to an annual fee of $63 per “covered participant” next year. pany estimates this means a more than $10 million expense in 2014. The catch for Delta is that, because many of their employees insure through Delta, the fee meant to help subsidize the health care law’s coverage amounts to a “direct subsidy” from pany that provides “zero direct benefit to our participants,” Kight said.

Another added es from the requirement to cover children and young adults on parents’ plans until they’re 26 years old. Kight reports that the change led to 8,000 more people being added to their rolls, at an annual cost of $14 million.

Further, the individual mandate — or the requirement on individuals to obtain health insurance — is expected to drive more people into pany plan and drive up their costs by another $14 million.

es just after the announcement from UPS and the University of Virginia that they are both dropping spousal insurance for their employees due to the cost of Obamacare. UPS told its employees:

Since the Affordable Care Act requires employers to provide affordable coverage, we believe your spouse should be covered by their own employer — just as U.P.S. has a responsibility to offer coverage to you, our employee.”

“In an effort to maintain premiums at or below current cost,” Andrew McGowan, a U.P.S. spokesman, said, “U.P.S. made a change that affects a limited number of employees.”

This plan affects about one-quarter of the UPS workforce in the U.S.

While the University of Virginia has been a supporter of Obamacare, the $7 million per year spousal support was expected to add to their budget proved to be too much of a burden for the school.

Along with cuts to family insurance plans, Obamacare is forcing many businesses to cut employee hours, especially in the food service industry. The Economist says that Obamacare isn’t a healthy plan for our nation at all:

…Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago contends that Obamacare’s distortions to the labour market will outweigh any growth from lowering health costs…Mr Mulligan predicts that Americans will work 3% less in 2015 than they otherwise would have.

Interestingly, the number of jobs in sectors most affected by Obamacare, such as retail, leisure and hospitality, have grown relatively quickly, notes Alec Phillips of Goldman Sachs. But the hours worked in such industries have grown more slowly, suggesting a reluctance to add more full-time jobs.

When the final diagnosis is done, Obamacare may have nasty side-effects.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The DIA, Public Art, and the Common Good
In today’s Acton Commentary, “It’s Time to Privatize the Detroit Institute of Arts,” I look at the case of the DIA in the context of Detroit’s bankruptcy proceedings. One of my basic points is that it is not necessary for art to be owned by the government in order for art to serve the public. Art needn’t be publicly-funded in order to contribute to mon good. In the piece I criticizeHrag Vartanian for this conflation, but this view is in...
Oikophilia Will Save the World
The central thesis of philosopher Roger Scruton case for an environmental conservatism, says Leah Kostamo, is that the primary motivation for care for the earth is oikophilia—a love of home. Oikophilia, Scruton argues, is what emboldens people to make sacrifices for their surrounding environment and neighbour. Scruton spends many pages tracing the history of oikophilia, particularly in his native Britain, and howoikophilia has been destroyed by internationalism and big-government subsidies and regulations. [. . .] In light of the success...
Women Speak For Themselves: ‘Don’t Insult Our Intelligence’
Ever since the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that requiring most employers to cover birth control, abortificients and abortions as part of employee health care coverage, there has been a firestorm of attention focused on the mandate. Both secular and religious employers have fought the order, stating that it violates their moral and/or religious principles to pay for these things, which many do not believe fall into the category of “health care.” (See Acton PowerBlog posts here,...
How Church Foreign Aid Programs Make Things Worse
In an interview with Forbes‘ Jerry Bower, Peter Greer, president and CEO of the the Hope International, explains why church foreign aid programs often hurts those its meant to help: Greer: There’s an entrepreneur named Jeff Rutt, and after the fall of the Soviet Union he had a desire to go over with his church and help. So, initially they did what people so often do, which is see that people don’t have food and then send over food, and...
Contraceptive Mandate Divides Appeals Courts
Two different federal appeals courts have issued opposite rulings on whether Obamacare can pany owners to violate their religious beliefs by providing contraception and abortifacients to their employees. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled that a Pennsylvania pany owned by a Mennonite family ply with the contraceptive mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act. The majority said it “respectfully disagrees” with judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit...
The Growth Of The Global Middle Class
It’s true: the middle-class is growing, globally. Here in the U.S., we keep hearing dire warnings about a shrinking middle class, but not across the globe. Alan Murray, president of The Pew Research Center, says witnessing its third great surge of middle-class growth. The first was brought about in the 19th century by the Industrial Revolution; the second surge came in the years following World War II. Both unfolded primarily in the United States and Europe. While those undergoing this...
How Improving Vocabulary Improves Human Flourishing
One of the core principles of the Acton Institute mitment to wealth creation since material impoverishment undermines the conditions that allow humans to flourish. We consider helping our fellow citizens to escape material deprivation to be one of the most morally significant economic concerns of our age. But how to do we gauge whether our neighbors are able to improve their economic security? A key metric that is often used is e or social mobility, the ability of an individual...
Pat Robertson, Poverty, and Possibilities
Television evangelist Pat Robertson is certainly known for saying provocative things, and he’s done it again. When Robertson’s co-host, Wendy Griffith, said not all families could afford to have multiple children, Robertson replied, ‘That’s the big problem, especially in Appalachia. They don’t know about birth control. They just keep having babies.’ ‘You see a string of all these little ragamuffins, and not enough food to eat and so on,’ he said, and it’s desperate poverty.’ Let’s not discuss how horrible...
Europe’s Curious Conception of Religious Freedom
By failing to recognize the importance of religion and its relationship to human rights, says Roger Trigg, European courts are progressively eroding religious liberty: [T]he Council of Europe affirmed in 2007 that “states must require religious leaders to take an unambiguous stand in favour of the precedence of human rights, as set forth in the European Convention of Human Rights, over any religious principle.” It is ironic that freedom of religion is expressly protected by the Convention and that the...
Has Foodie Culture Forgotten the Poor?
Food has been an essential part of Christian culture since Jesus shared a last meal with his Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. So it’s not surprising that Christians — especially young Christians in urban areas — are the epicurean hobby culture of “foodies.” But as Erik Bonkovsky, a pastor in Richmond, Virginia, says, a truly great and thoroughly Christian food scene is one that blesses the privileged and under-privileged alike: Foodie culture—particularly with a local and healthy dimension—is now...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved