ObamaCare Betrayal: Big Corporations To Offer Health Insurance NOT Covering Hospital Stays, Surgery

If you work at Bill Miller Bar-B-Q in Texas, ObamaCare means that you'll get the following insurance plan. Oh, you lucky duckies! From the debacle that is putting preservation of private health insurance corporation profits ahead of public health:

San Antonio-based Bill Miller Bar-B-Q, a 4,200-worker chain, will replace its own mini-med with a new, skinny plan in July. The new plan... will cover only preventive services, six annual doctors' visits and generic drugs. X-rays and tests at a local urgent care chain will also be covered. It wouldn't cover surgeries or hospital stays.

You got that right -- thanks to immoral employers -- and gutless politicians and regulators -- big business will be able to offer the same 'shitty deals' to their employees that they have in the past without getting in any trouble:

Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.

Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn't cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all.

Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing.

The idea that such plans would be allowable under the law has emerged only recently. Some benefits advisers still feel they could face regulatory uncertainty. The law requires employers with 50 or more workers to offer coverage to their workers or pay a penalty. Many employers and benefits experts have understood the rules to require robust insurance, covering a list of "essential" benefits such as mental-health services and a high percentage of workers' overall costs.

Say what?! Employers are set to screw over employees by providing them with coverage that won't even help them pay the bill for a broken leg, and the Federal Government is agreeing with these bastards 'in concept'?

Fuck you, Max Baucus, and weak-kneed Health & Human Services bureaucrats:

But a close reading of the rules makes it clear that those mandates affect only plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm. That affects only about 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers, according to a Citigroup Inc. C +0.20% report. Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.

Such policies would generally cost far less to provide than paying the penalty or providing more comprehensive benefits, say benefit-services firms.

Administration officials confirmed in interviews that the skinny plans, in concept, would be sufficient to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty. Several expressed surprise that employers would consider the approach.

Of course, our friends at Aetna and Cigna must be drooling over this travesty -- they make big bucks on junk insurance that covers nothing at all.

In short, from Physicians for a National Health Program:

Imagine health insurance not covering hospitalizations nor surgery. Yet this is still possible because the Affordable Care Act applies the essential health benefit requirement only to plans for small businesses and individuals and not to larger employers.

This has opened up the opportunity for a conspiracy between larger employers who could care less whether or not their employees have health insurance and private insurers who are quite willing to sell these almost worthless bare-bones products as long as there is a profitable market for them.

The solution is obvious. Cover all care that people need, and then provide that coverage to everyone, automatically. Maybe these uncaring employers might not like that, but when the taxes to pay for an equitable system are obligatory, they would get used to the idea of their employees being able to obtain health care when they need it. Not such a bad idea after all, especially when their competitors are treated the same.

Our health care non-system is fucking barbaric, cruel and insane.

SinglePayer (Medicare For All) is the only solution -- clearly, our private insurance and corporate overlords are unwilling to submit to the regulatory oversight necessary to make a 'market-based' Swiss system work in this country.