If You Like Your Coverage You Can Keep Your Coverage, And Also, One Bridge Over The East River For Sale, Charming 19th Century Touches, Lots of Sunlight, Prime Downtown Location

At Hot Air, Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen sees the writing on the wall.

While it’s too early to proclaim the demise of job-based coverage, corporate number crunchers are looking at options that could lead to major changes.

“The economics of dropping existing coverage is about to become very attractive to many employers, both public and private,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen, D-Tenn.

The White House claims the $2000 per employee penalty for dropping coverage will keep them from doing so, but Ed has a good analysis of why that's just plain wrong.

For a long time economists and policy-wonks have had a narrative that employment-based health care was just inefficient, and a kind of kooky system that arose by accident due to WWII wage controls. (The country froze wages so companies began offering non-wage inducements, like health insurance.)

That said, there are orderly ways to encourage a volunatary move to people buying their own insurance -- such as John McCain's proposed voucher (which would have bought a nice plan) -- and there disorderly, coercive ways. Like employees suddenly dropping millions of people from health care coverage and turning them out into an individual market that might not be ready for them.

Like -- if you have, say, glaucoma. Your current insurer has to pay for those treatments because you developed it during the course of your insurance coverage, right?

But what happens when you old insurer dumps you and you enter the individual market? To them, it's an existing condition, isn't it?

This must be repealed. ObamaCare must be repealed. We need to have a Congress as full up as Republicans as possible, so that when companies do begin dropping insurance coverage, we need as few Democrats as possible in joining us to override Barack Obama's veto.

posted by Ace at 01:16 PM

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