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 6:02 AM

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
4 Reasons to Support School Choice from Pope Francis’s ‘Amoris Laetitia’
Pope Francis’s recently released apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitiahas received considerable attention because of the issue of divorce munion. But the 60,000+ word document has much more to say about family life than the dissolution of marriage. For example, it provides pelling reasons for all Christians (not just Catholics) to support school choice. The term “school choice” refers to programs that give parents the power and opportunity to choose the schools their children attend, whether public, private, parochial, or homeschool. While...
Audio: Samuel Gregg Revisits Regensburg
Samuel GreggOn Monday evening, Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg joined host Sheila Liaugminas on Relevant Radio’s A Closer Look to examine Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address as we approach the tenth anniversary of its delivery. Greggemphasizes the fact that our understanding of who God is and what his nature is has important implications for how we understand human liberty and rationality, and argues that as western nations have gradually abandoned the Christian religious principles that formerly undergirded their...
Money and Moral Absolutes
In medieval Europe merchants would often writeDeus enim et proficuum (“For God and Profit”) in the upper corners of their accounting ledgersorA nome di Dio e guadangnio (“In the Name of God and Profit”) on partnership contracts. These words reflected their authors’ conviction that banking and finance were economically useful endeavors,saysSamuel Greggin this week’s Acton Commentary. Luis Molina and the many other Christians who explored these areas throughout history were not searching for greater marketplace effi­ciencies. Their concern was moral....
Lex Luthor, Capitalist Villain
In an earlier post pared the political economy of superheroes in the DC and Marvel universes. And today I have a piece up at The Stream examining the figure of Lex Luthor, the crony capitalist villain featured in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. As I write in that piece, Luthor is certainly more than a crony capitalist, but he is not less than one, and it is this corruption of democratic capitalism that serves as a backdrop for his...
Tesla Motors Releases a Car for the Masses That Runs on Coal
Electric cars are not a new invention, nor are they as popular as they once were. (They debuted in 1890 and by 1900 electric cars accounted for around a third of all vehicles on the road.) But over the past decade, thanks to Elon Musk and Tesla Motors, electric cars have e much more interesting. Tesla rolled out the first fully electric sports car in 2008 and a fully electric luxury sedan in 2012. And earlier this month they unveiled...
Rev. Sirico: Pope Francis’s Love Letter to the Family
“What the pope has brought forth is honest, timely and sensitive,” writes Rev. Robert A. Sirico, co-founder and president of the Acton Institute. “Amoris Laetitia explores plicated pastoral situations that any confessor will know all too well: challenges of how weak and fallen people can authentically live the faith.” In the Detroit News, Rev. Sirico discusses Pope Francis’s love letter to the family: The pope’s reflections are aimed at how to make a solid moral discernment in the midst of...
Roundup: Samuel Gregg on Pope Francis and Overpopulation, Pope Leo XIII and Modernity, and Constitutional Conservatism
New articles from the indefatigable Samuel Gregg, research director of the Acton Insitute: Amoris Laetitia: Another Nail in the “Overpopulation” Coffin, The Catholic World Report Here the pope signals his awareness of the efforts of various organizations—the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the EU, particular US administrations—to push anti-natalist policies upon developing nations. A Revolutionary Pope for Revolutionary Times, Crisis Magazine Between 1878 and 1903, Leo issued an astonishing 85 encyclicals. Many dealt squarely with the political, social, and...
A Papal Revolution
This year marks the 125th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum and the beginning of the modern Catholic social encyclical tradition. In this landmark text, Leo courageously set out to examine the “new things” of his time, especially the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. These included the emergence of an urbanized working class, the breakdown of old social hierarchies, and the rise of capitalism as well as ideologies such as socialism, munism, and corporatism. On April 20,...
Leftist Shareholders Attack Corporate Free Speech
On its website, Trinity Health trumpets its shareholder activism. Based in Livonia, Mich., the Catholic health care provider boasts operations in 21 states, which includes 90 hospitals and 120 long-term care facilities. For this last, Trinity should be lauded. For the first, however, your writer is left shaking his head. Among Trinity’s list of five shareholder advocacy priorities, two stand out: • uphold the dignity of the human person. • enable access to health care. In other words, issues any...
North Koreans face new challenges after they defect
They faced potential starvation, imprisonment, torture, and made a dangerous journey to freedom only to discover new struggles that they never could prehended in their former lives. Stories and reports of North Koreans fleeing their country aren’t particularly unusual. There are dozens of books written by or about North Korean defectors. Last week, thirteen North Koreans who worked for a restaurant fled to South Korea. It’s also been recently reported that a high-ranking colonel from North Korean military’s General Reconnaissance...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved