I’m shocked that business would do things to evade being sucked into Obamacare!
It turns out that 68% of employers are self-insured. That means they pay the actual expenses of their employee’s health care – small employers have the option of buying a “stop loss” policy that kicks in if a single employee crosses over a threshhold of expenses (typically at least $10k).
Those wascally capitalists pigs also have set up private insurance exchanges that are not part of the Obamacare risk pool. Here is a story from Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/09/07/instead-of-obamacare-large-employers-will-keep-coverage/
The origin of this concept was created in ERISA passed originally in 1974. One of the advantages to large employers is it exempts them from state insurance control and taxation of their plan
http://www.siia.org/i4a/pages/Index.cfm?pageID=4546
That page indicates that 50 million people are currently in those self-insured plans. The Obamacare people have figured out that as employers figure out what Obamacare is, they’re going to increase the number of the self-insured employers which will cause the Obamacare pools to not have the money they were expecting. The Center for American Progress is unhappy.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/healthcare/news/2013/08/16/72190/the-threat-of-self-insured-small-businesses-to-people-of-color/
“Fortunately, this dangerous trend can be prevented without congressional legislation. The solutions are simple: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, whose federal rulemaking authority includes the ability to set minimum standards for states, could broaden certain insurer definitions so that both stop-loss policies and self-insurance are subject to the reforms of the Affordable Care Act.”
Art, Next think you will tell me is that there is stock trading going on – outside the NYSE and NASDAQ on “dark” private exchanges. š
I’m shocked!
The reason I had lived in Chicago before was I designed and led the group that built the mainframe side of the “Project A” electronic trading system at the Chicago Board of Trade.
One of the things I was told was the CBOT found it hard to keep bookies out of the building. Being a futures trader meant it looks normal for you to have a large number of phone lines and huge amounts of cash going in and out – and the math of odds making are fairly similar to options trading
NASDAQ was always a group of competing independent trading platforms trading the NASDAQ stocks. It used to be the transaction costs were a drag that would have prevented folks from doing trades on a tiny spread.
NASDAQ redid the way the trade reports and how fees are incurred, and relaxed the rules that a human had to initiate every trade, so this was the predictable outcome. The trading system I designed for NASDAQ was scalable and fast – my memory is the design objective was to handle 150 trades a second in a single issue – the aggregate of all stocks would be limited mainly by the bandwidth of the network and the ability of firms to process 1000s of messages per second.
Once the systems were in place, the message volume exploded(I left after the system made it through integration testing). The effect of that is your typical stock broker could not afford the infrastructure to keep up. With trade rates way beyond what a human can comprehend based on raw data, it forced buying and selling to larger centralized brokers like Bernie Madoff and Goldman Sachs.
I have been otherwise occupied so not on top of this
Monday is the date the NYSE ceases to exist and its purchase by ICE should be complete. The SEC has signed off on the deal
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/10/11/ice-and-nyse-euronext-set-nov-4-closing-date-for-m.aspx
Right out of the box, about 1000 NYSE people will be let go as operations of the NYSE moves to Atlanta. His Honor Bloomberg will of course deny any connection to the exodus from Nanhattan, and we can expect Chuckie Cheese Schumer to hold his Sunday news conference to threaten to block the job loss in New York City. Look for a glut of office space around Wall Street in the near future – it’s a good thing we rebuilt the Freedom Tower. The World Trade Center always struggled with high vacany rates. It had been built by the State of New York as a jobs project, not because of market forces.
One World Trade Center will open next year, a mere 13 years after the September 11th attack. The anchor tenant will be the Publisher of Vanity Fair magazine. Rebuilding the “Freedom Tower” with its 500 foot spire will end up being the World’s tallest white elephant [no offense to white people].
http://nypost.com/2013/09/09/developers-promise-to-finish-new-wtc-in-early-2014/
Will it be in the “lucky” 25%?
http://chroniclenewspaper.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20131028/NEWS01/131029963/NY-comptroller:-25-percent-of-property-tax-exempt
The original WTC was built by the bi-state (NJ-NY) agency that has a monopoly on bridge and tunnel crossings so that they would not have to eliminate tolls once all the bonds were paid back.
On the NJ side, the Garden State Parkway did the same and built a Performing Arts Center rather then eliminate tolls.
As incentives increase for self-insurance, more businesses will take on the additional risk because of the savings it offers.
The unstated loser is the unhealthy person that is able to work. A urine test and a background check combined with a visual inspection during the interview process should weed out the usual suspects.
Check out this from that American Progress article…. looks like cracker whitey will live forever and has no health issues… if more employers read this article, why would they want to hire anyone other that cracker whitey?
“Under stop-loss policies, it is often possible to raise premiums or refuse to renew coverage for all employees or individuals based on declining health status, age, and predicted or preexisting conditions. They also participate in ālasering,ā a practice that targets specific employees who have higher health costs or risks. African Americansāwho are 40 percent more likely than whites to have hypertension and therefore more likely to need prescription drug heart treatmentāare not only less likely to receive the prescription-drug coverage they need under a self-insured plan, but are also at risk of being targeted by a stop-loss policy and losing coverage entirely. Additionally, Hispanics have higher rates of end-stage renal disease and cervical cancer compared to their white counterparts, and Asian Americans suffer disproportionately from certain kinds of cancer, making these minorities perfect targets for the unregulated stop-loss policies. This leaves the 10.2 million minorities who work for small businesses vulnerable to higher premiums, more out-of-pocket costs, less coverage, and fewer consumer protections.”
My 65 year old black friend and I had lunch on Thursday and Obamacare consumed a fair amount of the conversation. he mentioned that he was looking to buy long term care insurance and was told he is uninsurable. any honest discussion of health care can’t overlook genetics. he’s on hypertension medication and overweight (but not as much as I am. he’s a former smoker. I’m thinking his retirement may be short lived, which makes me sad. i turn 58 in a few weeks. I never in a million years thought I might reach 62 – but there is something to be said for living a prudent life.
HOW SWEET ~ THE SECRET TO LONG LIFE
Bless her little heartā¦
http://tobkes.othellomaster.com/archives/2012/11/14/how-sweet-the-secret-to-long-life/
The insurance companies also have different plans with with different doctors. The lowest price plans include the new doctors with no patients yet – they are willing to take a very low rate to start seeing patients.
The higher priced plans include the award winning doctors that are in demand by the public and command a higher fee. The higher priced plans also filter out doctors that have had malpractice issues and complaints by patients.
If you are someone like Donald Trump and are sick, you don’t want to be the first patient of someone that just opened an office, but if you have not been able to afford a doctor visit for several years, you are grateful to be seen by a doctor.
Even with the DGME “freeze” limiting the number of new doctors being trained in teaching hospitals, a significant portion of the cap is still being filled by graduates of non-US medical schools.
Only 7% of graduating doctors are going into primary care, but over 50% of doctor visits are for primary care. The current system pays cash for slapping on a diagnosis, not for tine spent routine assessments and discussion of health issues that don’t end with a specialist referral, diagnostic tests or a prescription.