Ten months after the bureaucratic nightmare Obamacare was passed, there is even more evidence of its failure to live up to the promises made about it.
Just like you can lead a horse to water but not force him to drink, you can make employers offer insurance, but you can’t force their employees to buy it. The media promoted the Affordable Care Act, but one liberal paper is now admitting another problem with the law.
On Oct. 21, The New York Times reported that employees aren’t always lining up to purchase the insurance that the government required their employers offer.
“The employer mandate has not yet had any noticeable effect on the number of workers enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans,” The Times reported.
Why? Because of the cost and the rules.
The Times continued, “Workers who are offered affordable individual coverage through their employers – a group that the employer mandate was intended to expand – are not eligible for government-subsidized insurance through the exchanges, even if their income would otherwise have qualified them.”
Many of these people are making near minimum wage and “a plan that qualifies as ‘affordable’ can still seem far out of reach.” So far out of reach, in fact, that one woman told The Times, “It’s either buy insurance or put food in the house.”
That’s a dismal outcome, since Obamacare’s core promise was affordability, according to Pew Research’s Stateline. “Affordable” was even part of the name of the legislation.
So many employees are foregoing insurance through their employers that insurance broker Michael Bodack of York International Agency, LLC, told the Times, “Based on what we’ve seen in the marketplace, we’re advising some of our clients to expect single-digit take rates.”
Billy Sewell, who employs 600 people at the Golden Corral restaurants he owns, said he only had two employees enroll.
Ultimately these low enrollments leave companies vulnerable to being dropped by insurance companies after one year - meaning that finding a new insurance provider may become an annual occurrence.
Despite a laundry list of Obamacare failures, many liberal media remained loyal fans.
In April 2014, The Washington Post reported enrollment numbers were questionable since many people never paid their premiums, and others who enrolled were just replacing the coverage that Obamacare had made them lose in the first place. ABC, CBS, and NBC however declared “victory” for Obamacare, and ignored the questionable status of the applications or enrollees.
In July 2014, there were 2.6 million unresolved problems and data inconsistencies in the applications of those seeking health care through the government’s online enrollment website, meaning that while people were trying to apply for insurance, the information submitted was often incorrect. Once again, however, the broadcast networks chose to overlook the issue.
The impacts of Obamacare even forced Associated Press to admit that it was a likely factor in the increase of part-time employment instead of full-time employment (as a direct result of the employer mandate).
