If you want real information about Obama care don't ask a politician or a republican, or a democrat. Ask a business owner, a health benefit administrator, or a professional health benefit consultant. When you speak to someone that is in the know you will feel sick about the disaster that will snow ball out of control.
Basically there are three groups that are affected.
1. Small and large groups that currently offer health benefits that are equal to or better than the Obama plan. These are the companies that do the right thing and have employees that also do the right the thing when it comes to insurance. They always see the big picture know how to sacrifice and manage within a company or household budget. Unfortunately the cost of these benefit plans will increase dramatically and companies will plan more and pass the increase to the employees. This group of people is mostly the middle class and always the group that gets hit the hardest.
2. Companies that don't offer insurance. Most of these groups will stay on that course by converting all of their employees into part time. They have been doing this for the last three years in preparing and will continue to do so. These businesses will get very creative in what they do to stay within the part time work week, and whatever they do will be legal and permitted under the ACA, and will not be subject to any fines or penalty. You will see similar companies sharing staff. Work at company A for 25 hours and then at company B for 20 hours. Company A & B will not have to provide a dime for coverage however the employee under the law now has to sign up for insurance through the exchanges and it is not Free, it is Affordable. Affordable is defined as 9.5% of what you make and that only is based on premium, not on deductible payments.
Now the exchanges that will be available on October first are nice and clean and pristine. The states that agreed to put their own together received a tremendous amount of money from the federal government. New York is boasting how the premiums went down. Well they have several providers in the exchange that are new and never existed. Health premiums are based on medical loss ratio and new companies have no history so initial premiums are understated. A lot of the exchanges are also quote premium rates on a 27 male which is considerably lower than a 45 year old smoker. So over the next two years federal funding stops and lower premiums rise because of actual loss ratios. Also the people that will sign up for the exchanges right away will be because most will have immediate use for health benefits which will increase the cost. The healthy young people will not sign up. The exchanges are designed for all the young healthy people to offset the unhealthy, but it is designed to fail.
3. The third group is the people under the poverty level that will go to the exchange and have the premiums subsidized by the government. In some cases 100% of the premium will be covered however deductibles will not, so everyone is paying. This is the group that the ACA was designed for and rightly so.
I think most would agree that we need to take care of the people in the third group but the current plan is not the way. There needs to be a better solution