“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” — NOT!!!
More fallout coming down the pipe:
Report: McDonald’s May Drop Health Care Plan
Published September 30, 2010 | FoxNews.com
McDonald’s Corp. has notified federal regulators its health insurance plan for nearly 30,000 hourly restaurant workers isn’t compatible with a new requirement of the U.S. health overhaul, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, raising speculation about the fate of those employees’ health coverage.
Trade groups representing restaurants and retailers say low-wage employers might halt their coverage if the government doesn’t loosen a requirement for “mini-med” plans, which offer limited benefits to some 1.4 million Americans. The requirement concerns the percentage of premiums that must be spent on benefits.
While many restaurants don’t offer health coverage, McDonald’s provides mini-med plans for workers at 10,500 U.S. locations, most of them franchised. A single worker can pay $14 a week for a plan that caps annual benefits at $2,000, or about $32 a week to get coverage up to $10,000 a year.
Last week, a senior McDonald’s official informed the Department of Health and Human Services that the restaurant chain’s insurer won’t meet a 2011 requirement to spend at least 80 percent to 85 percent of its premium revenue on medical care, the Wall Street Journal reported.
But McDonald’s issued a statement Wednesday denying that it planned to drop coverage for its employees and defending its benefit plans.
“We’ve had the opportunity to speak with regulatory agencies directly to better understand the implications of the law and to share our point of view,” Steve Russell, a senior vice president with the company, said in the statement. “Moving forward, we will continue to have an open dialogue with legislators as well as regulators.”
[That sounds very much like "damage control" rhetoric to me. Probably because many, many of McDonald's employees voted for The Zero...]
McDonald’s and trade groups say the percentage is unrealistic for mini-med plans because of high administrative costs owing to frequent worker turnover, combined with relatively low spending on claims. Democrats who drafted the health law wanted the requirement to prevent insurers from spending too much on executive salaries, marketing and other costs that they said don’t directly help patients.
Dozens of companies have taken charges against earnings—totaling more than $1 billion—over a tax change in prescription-drug benefits for retirees.
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30 September, 2010 at 10:34 am
By the time the Great One’s plans on healthcare are fully in place people will yearn for the good old days of $50 aspirins. Costs will go up rather than down, choices will be limited, quality of care will decline, there will be less people working in healthcare and there will be more confusion and chaos than ever. Everyone will be insured though-a dream come true for lefty numbers crunchers. Too bad we’ll all be basically underinsured and at the tender mercies of a super bloated bureaucracy. Hopefully a way is found to derail this oncoming train wreck before it takes place.
30 September, 2010 at 1:04 pm
As they said in Vaudeville “you ain’t seen nuthin yet”. These Socialist dirtbags have only begun to rake us over the coals.
2 October, 2010 at 8:24 am
There are already quite a few people that I know of that go outside the country for surgeries and so forth. (gall bladder surgery, for instance, is 1/5th the cost of US treatment in costa rica, travel included)
Now several insurance companies have decided to no longer even offer health insurance-getting out of the business entirely.
More and more “unintended consequences” on a daily basis.
2 October, 2010 at 4:41 pm
After seeing what has been done to public education, the post office, public unions and every other endeavor the national socialist guvmint is involved in it is obvious to most Americans that this is a criminal conspiracy. This is the ultimate of monstrosity. When your mail is screwed up it isnt life threatening, my guess is when peoples loved ones start dying because of this the first instinct would be to take it out on the doctors office but really that would be a mistake. If people are angry they should go right to the heart of the problem and that would be politicians, public unions, racist organizations, yeah, the entire left as well as a few squishy republicans. Heads will roll, this is much worse than postal problems, kids going to school and not learning or public unions gouging the people, it is important for the right heads to roll. They are playing with peoples lives here, this is fundamentally evil.