Transferring A Trillion Dollars in Wealth: Most of the ACA’s $965 billion in subsidies will go
directly to commercial insurance companies, one of the largest transfers of public wealth
to private hands ever. Since the ACA passed, the average stock price of the big for-profit
health insurers doubled, their top executives were paid more than a half billion dollars in
cash and stock options, and in the past 2 years, the top 10 insurers have spent $25 billion
on mergers and acquisitions.
• Strangling Fair Competition: Before reform, different types of health plans were regulated
under different bodies of law. The Obama Administration has blocked many non-profit
health funds from competing for the law’s proposed trillion dollars in subsidies by
refusing to set fair regulations for different types of plans. The unbalanced playing field
will give employers of people covered by these plans powerful incentives to drop coverage.
• Moving to Part Time Work: The Administration’s experts say employers won’t follow the
incentives and drop coverage. But they also told the nation that employers would not cut
workers’ hours to get below the 30-hour per week threshold for “full time” work, even as
388 employers announced hours cuts since early 2012.
• Cutting People’s Pay: If employers follow the incentives in the law, they will push families
onto the exchanges to buy coverage. This will force low-wage service industry employees
to spend $2.00, $3.00 or even $5.00 an hour of their pay to buy similar coverage.
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