Obamacare fee of $63 per person to begin in 2014

Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It’s a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Obama’s health care overhaul.

The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers.
Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a “sleeper issue” with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers.

“Especially at a time when we are facing economic uncertainty, [companies will] be hit with a multimillion-dollar assessment without getting anything back for it,” said Mr. Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary.

The Obama administration says it is a temporary assessment levied for three years starting in 2014, designed to raise $25 billion. It starts at $63 and then declines.
Most of the money will go into a fund administered by the Health and Human Services Department. It will be used to cushion health insurance companies from the initial hard-to-predict costs of covering uninsured people with medical problems. Under the law, insurers will be forbidden from turning away the sick as of Jan. 1, 2014.

The $25 billion fee is part of a bigger package of taxes and fees to finance Mr. Obama’s expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It all comes to about $700 billion over 10 years, and includes higher Medicare taxes effective this Jan. 1 on individuals making more than $200,000 per year or couples making more than $250,000. People above those threshold amounts also face an additional 3.8 percent tax on their investment income.

But the insurance fee had been overlooked as employers focused on other costs in the law, including fines for medium and large firms that don’t provide coverage.

Employers already offering coverage to their workers don’t see why they have to pay into the stabilization fund, which mainly helps the individual insurance market. The redistribution puts the biggest companies on the hook for tens of millions of dollars.

“It just adds on to everything else that is expected to increase health care costs,” said economist Paul Fronstin of the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute.

I somehow doubt the cushion for a mere couple of years is big enough.. I can easily see them saying it's greater than anticipated and start adding on $50 each and every year (probably increasing slightly year over year).

Seeing as that the cost of uninsured is somewhere around $480 for individual, $1300 for family, i'd say this will be a fantastic deal once the mandatory coverage kicks into effect.

It's actually easy to predict costs for people with existing conditions. They are farking expensive.

Do you care if people with existing conditions are covered or not? Should they be entitled to coverage from a moral stand point?

Do you care if people with existing conditions are covered or not? Should they be entitled to coverage from a moral stand point?

I personally think that basic rights like the right to live are more important than medical care.

Who gets to say where we draw the line? Oh ya... nm.

Do you care if people with existing conditions are covered or not? Should they be entitled to coverage from a moral stand point?

Why not shorten the life of the leechers?

The voting populace.