Obama administration estimate: As many as four out of five to lose their employer coverage

As the President's egregious "if you like your plan you can keep your plan" lie was being laid bare, there was one constant response. Democrats promised, again and again, that the cancellations - though impacting millions - would be limited to people who purchase individual insurance. That's about 8% of the population. Sure, it takes a staggering level of hubris to claim that 25 million Americans represent a "non-issue" but that was their claim. ...and, as usual, it was completely bogus.

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Andrew McCarthy at the National Review reports that the cancelations in the individual market are just the beginning...

Obama’s claim that unwelcome cancellations are confined to the individual-insurance market is another brazen lie. In the weekend column, I link to the excellent work of Powerline’s John Hinderaker, who has demonstrated that, for over three years, the Obama administration’s internal estimates have shown that most Americans who are covered by "employer plans" will also lose their coverage under Obamacare. Mind you, 156 million Americans get health coverage through their jobs.

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John cites the Federal Register, dated June 17, 2010, beginning at page 34,552 (Vol. 75, No. 116). It includes a chart that outlines the Obama administration’s projections. The chart indicates that somewhere between 39 and 69 percent of employer plans would lose their "grandfather" protection by 2013. In fact, for small-business employers, the high-end estimate is a staggering 80 percent (and even on the low end, it’s just a shade under half — 49 percent). That is to say: During all these years, while Obama was repeatedly assuring Americans, "If you like your health-insurance plan, you can keep your health-insurance plan," he actually expected as many as seven out of every ten Americans covered by employer plans to lose their coverage. For small business, he expected at least one out of every two Americans, or as many as four out of every five, to lose their coverage. With the pesky "grandfathering" out of the way, the mid-range estimate suggests more than half of all current employee plans will become illegal. New employer plans will need to be Obamacare-compliant and offer coverage for an expanded array of medical situations. As we've seen, they're predictably more expensive. That means there will be either a greater cost for the employer or a greater contribution from the employee. Either way, it's an economic boondoggle and it will likely end up incentivizing companies to simply dump people altogether, since the $2,000.00 per-emnployee fine is substantially less than the cost of providing coverage. Nothing about this is news - not really. Conservatives have been trying to sound this exact alarm for years. Heck, radio hosts like Levin, Hannity, and Limbaugh were making this argument back when the ACA bill was still being debated. However, most of the country ignored the warnings. They bought into the President's scam, reelected him, and (to a rapidly diminishing degree) still think the law is going to be "fixed" somehow. It's not. In fact, as the chart above demonstrates, the administration’s own estimate suggests that things are about to get much worse. Debbie Wasserman Schultz likes to claim that Democrats are eager to run on this mess. She also says that Americans losing their current coverage are not being cancelled. They are in the lucky position to "transition" to better, more expensive, coverage - whether or not they and their companies can afford it. According to a Fox News report, the American Enterprise Institute thinks Obamacare may end up torching as many as one hundred million small and large business policies next year. ...and, unless the President unveils another unconstitutional edict, it will start happening just before the elections. As this second wave of Democrat-sponsored "non-cancellations" draws closer, this time affecting a much larger segment of the public, expect to see a huge number of left-wing politicians abandon Schultz's position. At this point, no sane person can view Obamacare as anything other than a political millstone heading into the 2014 mid-terms.

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