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Tag: Cost of Affordable Healthcare

D.C. Council to Vote on Broad New Tax on Insurance to Cover City’s Health Care Exchange

The District’s health exchange has a problem — a big money problem.

Like the 14 states that started online marketplaces, the District faces a year-end deadline to prove its Web site can move past technology glitches to meet the next looming challenge in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act: financial self-sufficiency.

But unlike the others, the city does not have enough customers buying insurance on its Web site to copy the funding scheme adopted by most states and the federal government: a tax of a few percentage points on premiums.

To cover its $28 million annual budget, the District’s exchange would have to levy a whopping 17 percent tax on every health plan sold on its Web site.

Read full article here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.
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Obamacare’s Employer Mandate is Under Attack From Both Sides. Will it Survive?

Critics of the health care law, including many business owners, have long bemoaned a provision that requires employers to provide health coverage to their workers. Now, some of the law’s supporters are starting to call for the rule’s elimination, too. “Repeal of the employer mandate might, in fact, not be such a bad idea,” Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and vocal supporter of the Affordable Care Act, wrote this week in a column for Health Affairs.
In simplest terms, the employer mandate, as it has become known, requires firms with at least 50 workers to offer affordable, comprehensive health insurance to every full-time worker. If they don’t, they face fines of up to $2,000 per employee.

Read full article here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.
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Greater Healthcare Price Transparency Could Save $100 Billion Over 10 Years

Providing patients, physicians, employers and policymakers more information on healthcare prices could reduce U.S. healthcare spending by an estimated $100 billion over the next decade, according to a new analysis from the Gary and Mary West Health Policy Center.
Most healthcare transparency initiatives focus solely on providing patients with information on out-of-pocket costs. “While healthcare transparency is typically viewed through the lens of patient-facing transparency tools to drive comparison shopping, our analysis suggests even greater impact could be achieved by expanding the audience for such information,” said Dr. Joseph Smith, chairman of the West Health Policy Center Board of Directors. “We’ve found that providing price information to three key stakeholders—physicians, employers and policymakers—may have a far greater impact. And we have identified a range of new policy proposals, including three that, if implemented, could save $100 billion over 10 years.”

Read full article here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.
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The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Small Business

Whereas large corporations typically self-insure – paying their employees’ medical bills and hiring insurers to administer health benefits – small businesses purchase group health coverage from insurers and face cost-increasing regulations as they go through the annual ritual of renewing their coverage. Over the next few years, as regulations and mandates are finally implemented, Obamacare will affect how businesses operate – including hiring, employee compensation, growth and so forth.

The Mandate on Employers
Though media attention has focused on the federal and state health exchanges, much of the burden of complying with the Affordable Care Act will fall on business. Nearly two-thirds of Americans with health coverage have employer-sponsored health insurance – approximately 171 million people.
Health benefits are a significant expense for U.S. employers and a substantial portion of workers’ total compensation. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the required coverage for an individual will cost $5,800 a year or more in 2016 – the equivalent of an additional $3 an hour “minimum health wage.” Family coverage could cost more than twice that amount.
For instance: The cost of employee health benefits averages $2.70 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, representing 8.5 percent of private industry workers’ total compensation.
The Kaiser Family Foundation’s annual survey of employer health benefits found the average cost of an employee family plan was $16,351 in 2013.

Read full article here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.
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What Would it Cost to ‘Fix’ Obamacare?

You can’t find an Obamacare supporter anywhere who thinks that the massive health-care law is problem-free. Any major law regularly gets fixed through the legislative process after it’s passed, but the politics surrounding the Affordable Care Act has pretty much made this impossible so far.

Democrats on the campaign trail have often talked about the need for fixing and improving Obamacare without really getting into specifics. That prompted conservative policy expert Chris Jacobs of America Next to recently wonder what these fixes would cost and how they’d be paid for.

So I thought it would be a fun and useful exercise to round up Obamacare “fixes” that have garnered the broadest support and look at what they could potentially cost. How to pay for them — well, that’s another story.

Read full article here.

Contact Steven Cosby with questions or to request more information and to schedule a healthcare plan evaluation, savings analysis or group plan solution for your company.

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