Municipal Benefits
It’s not only businesses reassessing costs. Detroit and Chicago have proposed ending health plans for current or retired municipal workers, since they’ll be able to buy subsidized coverage through the health-care law. The Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s foremost medical centers, announced yesterday it’s considering layoffs, partly to prepare for cuts in Medicare payments contained in the law.
“What the ACA has done is put all 300 million-plus Americans in the mode of thinking about health care,” said Jim Winkler, a chief innovation officer at Aon Plc. The London-based company runs the private exchange that will serve Walgreen’s employees.
“You’ve got CEOs reading articles and going to conferences, and that leads to a lot of discussions with Finance and HR about, ‘What are you going to do to solve our health-care cost problem?’” Winkler said by telephone.
Big Employers
The shift by big employers, which now administer medical plans for 160 million Americans, could cause headaches for a law designed mainly to help the uninsured and small businesses.
Polls show support for Obamacare slipping, even as the administration prepares for the Oct. 1 debut of the online insurance exchanges where Americans can buy subsidized coverage under the act. Fifty-seven percent of Americans opposed the health-care law in a poll this month by CNN/ORC, a turnaround from January when the survey found 51 percent in support.
What the changes mean for workers is harder to predict.
IBM and Walgreen said employees will find more choice and, potentially, cheaper coverage by going through private exchanges, websites that will work similar to the new Obama markets, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all company plan.
That also puts the onus on workers to pick the right plan, an often complex choice now handled largely by human-resources professionals. Much also depends on whether employers continue to subsidize the plans and at what level, said Uwe Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University in New Jersey.