Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Obamacare: Driving Up Costs And Driving Down Those Insured
Obamacare: Driving Up Costs And Driving Down Those Insured
Nov 30, 2025 2:28 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
An Open Letter from Alexis de Tocqueville to President Barack Obama and the American People
I think that the oppression threatening democracies will not be like anything there has been in the world before…. I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls…. Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny. It is absolute, meticulous, ordered, provident, and kindly...
Health Care Subsidiarity in the UK and the US
A recent New York Times story reports that the new British government plans to “decentralize” the National Health Care system as part of its new austerity measures. Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use...
Rome’s Graffiti and Bastiat’s Broken Windows
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a nice piece about the problem of graffiti in Rome and the obstacles to cleaning it all up. While the graffiti are certainly an eyesore in an otherwise beautiful city, there is also great economic damage done, which leads to impoverished understandings of private property and general urban decay. If cleaning up the graffiti on a four-story palazzo can cost as much as €40,000, there are surely people there to profit from the clean-up. And...
Ralph Raico on Religion, Lord Acton, and Classical Liberalism
One of the charges sometimes leveled against classical liberal thought is thatit opposes all authority; that it seeks toreduce society to an amalgamation of atomized individuals, eliminating the role of munity, and vibrant social institutions. Historian Ralph Raico seeks to argue the very opposite in his dissertation, The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.The work has been republished for the first time by the Mises Institute. (A particularly interesting note is that the...
Europe’s Surviving Farmers Show True Entrepreneurial Spirit
Are the Old Continent’s farmers showing that they have a real entrepreneurial spirit and serving as role models of courage and innovation during the Great Recession? Surely not all of them, but there are some inspiring examples to be found in Central and Southern Europe. This is somewhat surprising as Europe’s agricultural sector is usually among the most traditional, least open to market innovation and product flexibility, and heavily reliant on EU funding to keep the petitive. Alas, European leadership...
Manuel F. Ayau (1925-2010): A Life for Liberty, Justice, and the Truth
Those who love freedom were saddened to learn this morning of the passing of one of the most significant contributors to the cause of liberty and individual responsibility in Latin America, Manuel F. Ayau, affectionately known as “Muso” to his many friends and acquaintances, after a long and brave struggle with cancer. A humble, self-effacing but determined man, Ayau is a classic example of someone who made a difference. Whereas others confined themselves to talking about the free society, Ayau...
Chinese Politics: Power, Ideology, and the Limits of Pragmatism
Chinese Communism is no longer about ideology. Now it is about power. I reached this conclusion on the basis of six months spent in China and extensive conversations with my Chinese friend and fellow Acton intern Liping, whose analysis has helped me greatly in writing this post. China began moving away from Communist ideology under Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reforms munes and created space for private businesses. He justified these reforms to his Communist colleagues with the saying, “It doesn’t...
Here I Stand: Marketing and Remembering the Reformation
I just couldn’t pass this one up. Below is an ENI story on the installation of 800 “colourful miniature figures of the 16th-century Protestant Reformer Martin Luther” in the market square of Wittenberg. Just as last year there was a good deal of academic mercial interest around the 500th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, you can expect a great deal of activity leading up to the 500th anniversary of the traditional date of the dawn of the Reformation...
Re: Broken Windows – University Funding Edition
As Kishore Jayabalan noted yesterday, the fallacy of “broken windows” is, unfortunately, ubiquitous in discussions of public finance and macroeconomics. Though we are told that government spending and public works have a stimulating effect on economic activity, rarely are the costs of such projects discussed. Such is the case with several stimulus projects in my own hometown of Atlanta, GA. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reportson a list that Sen. John McCain and Sen. Tim Coburn drew up,criticizing wasteful stimulus projects throughout...
Salary and Significance
During a recent conversation, a Chinese friend of mented on the lack of political involvement that she has observed in her peers, especially parison to American college students. She attributes this lack of involvement to the fact that the Chinese do not believe that political action can change the policies or even the identities of their leaders. As a result, non-politicians in China do not get involved in politics, and politicians there focus on achieving their own goals rather than...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved