Obamacare: Over 1,000 healthcare waivers have now been granted

  At the end of January I wrote a post about 733 multi-million dollar companies and unions were granted healthcare waivers so that they would not be required to meet the minimum coverage requirements as outlined in the healthcare reform law. It has been about five weeks since I wrote that post so, as you can imagine, that number has grown even higher. According to this story the number of organizations which have received healthcare reform waivers now tops 1,000. Roughly three hundred companies since my  last post have asked for and received a waiver from Obamacare.

  The Obama regime’s defense on this is rather interesting. They claim that these waivers are being granted in order to give these companies and unions more time to implement the law without disrupting the healthcare plans these organizations already have in place. (That’s right, these organizations already have healthcare benefits, the government just doesn’t think they are good enough.

  Disrupting plans that people already have? Hmm, interesting. Here is what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen  Sebelius had to say when asked about the healthcare waivers:

We don’t want to take away people’s health insurance before they have some realistic other choices

  Well, now isn’t that an interesting statement to make when you consider that Barack Obama promised the American people that if they had insurance they liked they would be able to keep it. The plans at issue here are called “mini-med” plans and they provide employers and employees a low cost, affordable healthcare plan, but these plans do not meet the minimum requirements under the new healthcare law so these organizations are being forced to change their plans.

  This in turn means that these companies will have to offer their employees a higher cost plan and we can easily assume that the employee will have to pay a higher premium out of his or her pocket–regardless whether or not the employee was perfectly happy with the “mini-med” program and regardless to the fact that they may not be able to afford higher premiums for a different insurance plan. Oh, just to make matters worse, while these companies were granted the waivers to give them time to come into line with the new law, once the employee is forced into another plan with higher costs they will not have the same luxury. They will buy the insurance and if they cannot afford it the IRS will be visiting their homes. These employees will have gone from having some coverage to being criminals.