Is anyone noticing differences with their employers because of Obamacare?

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**Easy E**

General Hobbs wrote:
Easy E wrote:
Does anyone believe Healthcare costs would be lower now if Obamacare had not been upheld?

Yes, they would be. Simple economics, laws of supply and demand.

By giving and making everyone get insurance, and by forcing insurance companies to take on people with pre-existing conditions, you raise the demand for healthcare. Since its covered by insurance, we are are already seeing people going to the hospital and seeing doctors for minor things that used to be tolerated.

Since insurance companies now have to "supply" more healthcare (ie make more payments), they have to raise premiums to cover the costs. Since doctors now have less time to spend per patient, and make "less" money per hour, you'll see their rates go up to make the difference.

You'll also see a lowering of quality and services, like any and every "free" or mandated service.

Now, open up the free markets to insurance and make them compete for dollars via good service, quality care etc and you'll see companies undercut each other, lowering costs for the consumers.

So how do you explain the last decade then where the conditions you mention were in place, and the costs STILL continued to rise?

**kronk**

No real difference for me so far. A few options/packages that no one ever took will be gone. Medical care prices have gone up, but they go up every year. So far, my company is still weathering it for us. We'll see how long that goes.

Stupid baby boomers getting old and sickly, ruining it for the rest of us!

**agnosto**

We received our option paperwork yesterday and no change whatsoever has occured here (public school employee). As mentioned previously, prices went up but oddly not as much as previous years.

**pretre**

No change for us. We got a letter explaining that we are free to participate in the marketplace but that because we have a good plan already through our employer we would get no discount, etc so on.

**whembly**

Many of my blue collar friends and family got their hours cut.

The 29 million non-managerial workers in private-sector industries which pay up to about $14.50 per hour, on average, put in a 27.4-hour week, a level previously matched only at the depths of the recession in 2009.

Workers in low-wage industries clocked the shortest average workweek on record in July, new Labor Department data show.

The 29 million non-managerial workers in private-sector industries which pay up to about $14.50 per hour, on average, put in a 27.4-hour week, a level previously matched only at the depths of the recession in 2009.

As the recovery began that summer, average weekly hours staged a recovery that erased most of the recession's decline. But the workweek recovery began to reverse in early 2012, and the drop-off has accelerated in 2013 — just as the onset of ObamaCare's employer mandate created new incentives for employers to restrict workers to fewer than 30 hours per week.

Through July (the latest month for which hours worked are broken down by industry group), these low-wage private industries have added 440,000 nonsupervisory jobs in 2013. But payrolls have been growing three times as fast as overall hours worked in these sectors. In effect, the shorter workweek has boosted low-wage industry payrolls by 300,000 this year.

The White House has sought to rebut charges that ObamaCare is negatively impacting work hours by pointing out that the private-sector workweek has recovered from 2009's depths nearly all the way back to where it was before the recession began.

But this ignores the very different trajectory of the workweek in low-wage sectors relative to the workweek for the other 85 million private-sector workers — who are working about an hour longer, on average, than they did in mid-2009 and just as long as they did back in 2007.

The evidence suggests that the majority of workers making well above $14.50 per hour may not have much to fear from ObamaCare's employer mandate. But it reveals that in industries for which ObamaCare's coverage mandates could mean substantial new costs — those in which wages are low and the ranks of the uninsured tend to be high - something is seriously depressing the workweek.

Anecdotal reports that low-wage employers are trying to dodge ObamaCare's costs by restricting workers' hours below 30 per week — the point at which health coverage mandates kick in — suggest that the simultaneous decline in the workweek and the launch of ObamaCare aren't merely a coincidence.

IBD's new ObamaCare Employer Mandate list details 258 examples (which can be downloaded into an Excel file) of employers that have cut work hours or jobs in response to the health law. In some cases, the anecdotes match up perfectly with the industry-specific data. Several providers of social assistance to the elderly and disabled have cut full-time workers to below 30 hours per week. Meanwhile, the average workweek for such firms has fallen to a record low of 27.3 hours from 28.6 hours in March 2010, when ObamaCare became law.

**agnosto**

The wording of your quoted article suggests a conservative news outlet; later in the piece they even admit to anecdotal evidence (i.e. made up). I see your BS conservative article and raise you a BS liberal one:
http://obamacarefacts.com/impact-of-obamacare-on-jobs.php

See? Both sides can twist data to meet their own agenda.

What we're really seeing is a lot of chicken-little nonsense that will eventually even out.

There's a concept called "Implementation Dip" that refers to a dip in productivity or other data as a result of implementing some new program. This concept is related to Education but can be seen in any industry. What basically happens is that behaviors change before beliefs. People are entrenched in the "old way" and when change occurs you have a certain population that runs around convinced that the world is going to end, the new policy is the cause and that there is no way that the new policy will result in an improvement. Hooey.

Anyone with real-life experience knows that new stuff is scary and even if it will help me, my tendency is to fight it because what is known is comfortable. It doesn't help that people who don't like it just make things up to "prove" themselves correct (death panels anyone?). So, in short, people are stupid and when stupid people get together THEY cause the sky to fall.

It's a bummer that people will be hurt while stupid small companies figure out that the law doesn't actually hurt them as much as reducing productivity will. Look at the biggest employers in the country of low-income jobs (Wal-Mart et al) of those, the majority already offer health-care so the supposed "trend" in your article is probably attributable to some other factor that was conveniently glossed over to "prove" their point.

Personally, I'm a fan of socialized medicine. I've lived in 2 countries (S. Korea and Japan) where one form of this existed and the people had a better quality of life because of it. I'm biased though. I grew up very poor and my father would be alive today if it would have been possible for him to go to a Dr. before his colon cancer got to the point that he couldn't work anymore which caused him to go to the hospital (high prices be damned) when it was too late to treat a very treatable condition if caught early.

I know people like to rant (this is the internet after all) but behind all the screaming about jobs and money, they're losing sight of the one thing that's really important in this "debate". Lives. I would gladly sacrifice all the jobs in 'Merica if it meant I could have my father back.

**whembly**

It's not BS... those are facts that are happening on the ground right now.

FWIW: I've always been saying we need to go the Canadian route... 'cuz they have maple syrup and hockey as well!

The crux of the matter is really all about implementation as you alluded. The debate is always the what/how. That's where the angst is truly at... not because it's a democrat plan or that it's named after the President.

**agnosto**

whembly wrote:
It's not BS... those are facts that are happening on the ground right now.

FWIW: I've always been saying we need to go the Canadian route... 'cuz they have maple syrup and hockey as well!

The crux of the matter is really all about implementation as you alluded. The debate is always the what/how. That's where the angst is truly at... not because it's a democrat plan or that it's named after the President.

I'm not arguing your data. I'm arguing the interpretation of the data. There could be underlying factors that are not pointed out by the obviously biased news organization that produced the article you quoted. Of course, it could be exactly what it's stated to be and completely attributable to Obamacare. I'm honestly too lazy and busy to research it. I can tell you that, as someone who manages people and programs for a living, that the "reaction" that we're seeing is just stupid people acting stupid. Honestly people spend more time watching duck dynasty or that other show about the fat little kid than they ever do actually reading the laws that draw so much criticism; they just happily post whatever crap they see on fox or cnn (god I hate facebook and would like to strangle half my family and several people I was dumb enough to accept friend invites from).

Canada's system is much better than we have now but it's not perfect. I look at Obamacare as a step in the right direction; sort of getting in on the shallow end of the pool with your kid floaters on your arms. We're not as advanced as some places in the world but moving away from outright hatred/indifference of the people that live in our country. It's always confused me why we are all for helping each other out when there's a disaster but don't want Bob that lives with his wife and two kids to have that surgery he needs so that he can continue to work and provide for him. It seems that people would much rather Bob wait until the condition gets so bad that he has to go on disability, draw food stamps and other forms of welfare and be a true burden on the taxpayers. Or say he does go to the Dr; we've created a healthcare system that is so expensive that he'll be in so much debt he has to declare bankruptcy just to feed his family which just furthers the increasing costs of the medical system...That's what's insane to me.

I'm not an Obama fan; I feel he's been a barely adequate president but one thing that he's done that I think is intelligent is he has owned the Obamacare lable that's been slapped on the AHCA by his opponents and made it his own.

**Grey Templar**

The problem is that, once this is implemented, for better or for worse we are stuck with it.

For when it does screw us over its going to be nearly impossible to alter it or get rid of it. This means that the risk of getting stuck with a bad system, and no way to get rid of it, is very high.

We should have made changes to Medicare instead, or made long term plans for this stuff without putting anything into law until we've worked out all the kinks.

We can't just say "Ooops, we made a boo-boo but we can easily fix it." No, we are stuck with that boo-boo for basically the foreseeable future.

**Easy E**

Almost as impossible as getting rid of the current version of HealthCare. I think Truman was the first US president to talk about HealthCare reform.

**whembly**

Nah... it's just a diabolical plan to make the system so bad, that everyone will say "Merci!"... then, say "Yahoo!" when the next Congress says, "Hey... let's replace it with single-payer... like Canada!".

C'mon... can't be that far from the truth.