The ObamaCare War On Marriage

Photo Credit: Human Events“Companies have a new solution to rising health-insurance costs: Break up their employees’ marriages,” says the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch:

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on its plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health.

But… but… “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: “That’s the next step,” Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. “We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

MarketWatch cites anecdotal evidence that some people are dropping their personal coverage so they can migrate to joint coverage provided by companies that do continue to offer it. That’s a nice near-term solution… if you happen to be married to someone who works for such a company. In the longer-term, what happens to the remaining plans that offer spousal coverage, after they’ve attracted all of those expensive spouses?

Read more from this story HERE.