Corporate insurance in those days was the great equalizer. I had what the CEO had, as did everyone in the mailroom. That “equalizer” is doomed with Obamacare. So says one of the chief architects of the president’s health care law, Ezekiel Emanuel. He told The New York Times that companies will move away from providing insurance and offer stipends for employees to buy insurance on the health care exchanges. Emanuel said the “Cadillac tax” imposed on high-cost full service plans will push companies to make that choice. “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance,” Emanuel told The Times.
Even now, as the bulging baby boom moves from private insurance to Medicare, more than 150 million Americans have employer-provided health insurance, not all of which of course is as generous as a Cadillac plan. Nevertheless, the unintended consequence of this move away from a “one-size fits all” corporate plan institutionalizes a health care system of “haves and have nots.” Why? If you have insurance through Obamacare, your odds of being accepted by one of the nation’s top hospitals or having access to top doctors is seriously diminished. …
Imagine you’re a new parent and your baby has a heart condition. You live in Seattle where Seattle Children’s Hospital has sued the state’s Office of Insurance for “failure to ensure adequate network coverage” through Obamacare. If you have insurance through one of the companies that isn’t accepted by Children’s, you’re out — or you have to pay the astonishing costs for access to their neo-natal care center. A hospital news release stated, “Children’s is the only pediatric hospital in King County and the preeminent provider of many pediatric specialty services in the Northwest.”
The result, of course, is that the nation’s high-end teaching hospitals—where the best research facilities and some of the best doctors in the world practice — will be mostly available to rich people. And perhaps just super rich people like Warren Buffett and the Koch Brothers. Clearly a paltry millionaire couldn’t afford more than a week at a NICU and still pay the mortgage on a Tribeca loft.
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