We passed it. Guess what's in it.

I'm not in human resources; most of my time is spent doing engineering, sales, marketing, and accounting --  functions necessary to keep my small manufacturing concern going.  But yesterday, I spent half the day at a seminar on this:

This flow chart appeared in the speaker's presentation on the "Affordable" "Care" "Act", otherwise known as Obamacare.  Now, I'm sure I know what you're thinking:  This chart is the work of some Tea Party crank who tried to make this seem much more complicated than it actually is -- it's a piece of propaganda.

That chart was published by the Department of Health and Human Services, as an honest attempt to simplify the law and its interdepartmental relationships.  This was produced by the act's proponents.  (That's them, the big red dot in the center of the universe.)



Elements of the law have started to come into effect.  Earlier last week, our business, and every employer in the US, was instructed to send out notices to all of our employees by October 1, informing them of the existence of exchanges.  We received these instructions from our insurance broker; had we not, we might have found ourselves noncompliant and subject to fines.  And rest assured, when you're talking about a law that looks like this:

...you will eventually, inevitably, find yourself in noncompliance.  The speaker at this symposium, Peter Marathas, has worked in Massachusetts during the Romneycare era, and told us this story:  One morning his client found that one of their bank accounts was $400,000 smaller than it had been the day before, because the state came in and took the money.  They did this because the business had failed to respond to requests for an audit of their health insurance policies, and they'd failed to reply because they had never received them -- the state agency had mailed them to the wrong address, in the wrong state.  The agency had actually received them back marked "return to sender."

When confronted with this fact, the state's representative said:  "It is always the employer's responsibility to respond to our notices, even when they don't receive our notices."

We have no in-house attorneys; we don't even have a formal human resources expert.  I've already attended three symposia on this monstrosity, making me our company's ACA "pointman" -- and I have no idea whether we'll know, or how we'll find out, what we're supposed to do next to remain in compliance.

But I'm sure all of these hidden costs of compliance, business-destroying and soul-sucking red tape, and enormous fees and taxes (HIT, Temporary Reinsurance Fee, etc.) will be worth it, because of the wonderful insurance that will be made available to everyone through the exchange.  If you haven't checked these plans out, I'd encourage you to use this calculator.  Plans range in level from Platinum (aka "shitty and over-priced") down to Bronze (aka "why would anyone pay this much for insurance with an actuarial value of 60%.")

For a family of 4 making $60,000 per year, a Silver plan that pays roughly 70% of expenses for covered benefits would cost them about $5,000 per year, taxed income, and they'd still be liable for up to $12,700 per year in out-of-pocket costs, not including that $5,000 premium.  And that's with $5,000 in subsidies, that we would all pay on that family's behalf.  At that rate, I'm sure literally dozens of people will be clamoring to purchase this insurance.

And if that same family makes $80,000 per year, their premium will be $7,600 per year.  That's an additional $2,600 premium, simply because that family has a $20,000 higher gross income (which would be just $15,000 net).  So that's essentially a new income tax, on top of that family's current tax -- the marginal rate at that level basically goes from 25% to 38%.

But that family of four making a whopping $80,000 per year, they're fat-cat one-percenters.  They can afford it.  Once you have so much money, you don't need any more, a great man once said.

We passed it, and what's in it?  Wealth redistribution, confiscatory fees and taxes (including "cascading taxes" where taxes will increase fees and those increased fees will increase taxes), some truly shitty insurance that no one will want, and a mine field of hidden and unknowable disasters-waiting-to-happen for employers.