I noted today in the
It’s a kindly gesture and one that, one imagines, might be moderately calculated to help offset the Obama family’s more than troublesome experiences in the month of October. A period, for those of you already up to your elbows in ACA coverage, that may not have been the finest hour for this second-term administration. Something of a train-wreck, actually.
With scheduled overnight site outages at the federal exchange hub now as frequent as weekend work on the DC Metro system (though today brings news that the daytime operations of the site have actually been amped up considerably), the ride for this first real public face of Obamacare has been rocky indeed.
Setting that whole debacle aside for a second, I must note that the truer realities of the ACA’s impact are at long last beginning to bubble to the surface. Employees – and the uninsured – have started to get the gist of what this is all really going to mean for them, and reaction is all over the place, both good and bad. But at least it’s real, not just reaction to reaction itself, or polls based on a few days’ worth of impressions during the government shutdown.
Employers and HR professionals will, in their own way, have to come to terms with the most common (but hopefully not absolutely systemic) reality for employees, that being that rates will, in some cases, go up. That’s a simple fact of life, and you can blame the ACA all you want, but the truth is that health care rates were likely to inch marginally anyhow.
The rate of explosive increases in health care, if you’d like a more positive message for your participants, has slowed from massive jumps in the mid- and late-00s to an unpleasant but more reasonable 6% to 6.5%. That’s just a given; I think that even experts are not foreseeing more explosive rate changes than that, other than those employees suddenly left on the hook for their entire health care bill as frightened employers drop coverage or switch to high-deductible plans.
And then there’s the other side of the coin. I’ve already heard from friends in the beleaguered journalism profession – freelancers who enjoy no benefits at all, and found themselves paying more than 50% of their limited income just to maintain coverage – who really are fans of the ACA and its coverage, and realize it will make their lives considerably more civilized as a result.
I am, frankly, hoping to hear more of these real stories and real experiences, good or bad, once the furor over the mechanics of online enrollment dies down. In the meantime, expect the excitement to continue: Nothing makes great headlines like a president with problems. Though there seem to be larger actual problems like this facing us all.
Andy Stonehouse is Editor-in-Chief of Employee Benefit News. He can be reached at
