Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Obamacare: Driving Up Costs And Driving Down Those Insured
Obamacare: Driving Up Costs And Driving Down Those Insured
Jan 20, 2026 6:01 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
Washington Times on green candidates
Presidential front-runners and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are lacking environmental leadership by failing to pay for offsets to cover their campaign carbon emissions. An article in the Washington Times titled, Green Crusades Lot of Talk, by Stephen Dinan, notes John McCain and Barack Obama aren’t leading by example. “Though both campaigns say they practice energy conservation, Mr. Obama offsets only some of his airplane flight emissions, while Mr. McCain doesn’t cover even that,” says Dinan. It looks as...
Kosovo: Pandora’s Box
Nearly two years ago, in “Who Will Protect Kosovo’s Christians?” I wrote: Dozens of churches, monasteries and shrines have been destroyed or damaged since 1999 in Kosovo, the cradle of Orthodox Christianity in Serbia. The Serbian Orthodox Church lists nearly 150 attacks on holy places, which often involve desecration of altars, vandalism of icons and the ripping of crosses from Church rooftops. A March 2004 rampage by Albanian mobs targeted Serbs and 19 people, including eight Kosovo Serbs, were killed...
The glory of socialized medicine
It’s a shame that the marvel of government-controlled health care hasn’t been implemented in the US yet: Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets. Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour pledge. What a fool I’ve been to oppose this...
A note on social and intellectual history
Speaking of the history of morality and moral judgments in historiography, Alister MacIntyre makes a pointed observation about plementary distinction that arises between what might be called “intellectual” and “social” history: Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events. There is a history yet to be written in which the Medici princes, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, Frederick the Great and Napoleon, Walpole and Wilberforce, Jefferson and Robespierre are understood as expressing their actions, often partially...
‘A Patriarch in dire straits’
Bartholomew I mentary this week looked at “Encountering the Mystery,” the new book from Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of the Orthodox Church. In 1971, the Turkish government shut down Halki, the partriarchal seminary on Heybeliada Island in the Sea of Marmara. And it has progressively confiscated Orthodox Church properties, including the expropriation of the Bûyûkada Orphanage for Boys on the Prince’s Islands (and properties belonging to an Armenian Orthodox hospital foundation). These expropriations happen as religious minorities report problems associated...
Georgia town reconnects with radio legend
Ernie Harwell was calling the play by play over television for the first live televised sports broadcast from coast to coast. The series featured the famous “shot heard round the world” at the Polo Grounds in 1951. It’s possibly baseball’s most well known historic moment featuring a dramatic 9th inning home run by Bobby Thompson to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers, sending the New York Giants to the World Series. It was Russ Hodges radio call of the same game, however,...
Orthodoxy and economic globalization
AGAIN Magazine has published my “Conflicted Hearts: Orthodox Christians and Social Justice in an Age of Globalization.” The magazine is produced by Conciliar Press Ministries, Inc., a department of the self-ruled Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church of North America. Excerpt: Just as there is no real understanding of many bioethical issues without a general grasp of underlying medical technology, there is no real understanding of “social justice” without an understanding of basic economic principles. These principles explain how Orthodox Christians work,...
Global Warming Consensus alert: Climate linked to sun
A Harvard Astrophysicist argues that global warming is more related to solar cycles than to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. QUICK! Someone find out how Exxon managed to buy her off! In her lecture series, “Warming Up to the Truth: The Real Story About Climate Change,” astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas shared her findings Tuesday at the University of Texas at Tyler R. Don Cowan Fine and Performing Arts Center. Dr. Baliunas’ work with fellow Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Willie...
The cost of good intentions
Interesting: Backed by studies showing that middle-class Seattle residents can no longer afford the city’s middle-class homes, consensus is growing that prices are too darned high. But why are they so high? An intriguing new analysis by a University of Washington economics professor argues that home prices have, perhaps inadvertently, been driven up $200,000 by good intentions. Just some food for thought on a Friday afternoon. ...
Climate change food for thought
“The challenge of climate change is at once individual, local, national and global. Accordingly, it urges a multilevel coordinated response, with mitigation and adaptation programs simultaneously individual, local, national and global in their vision and scope”, stated Archbishop Celestino Migliore, representative of the Holy See, at the 62nd session of the U.N. General Assembly, which took place earlier this month. The theme of the session was “Addressing Climate Change: The United Nations and the World at Work.” Much attention is...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved