As Ezra Klein notes this morning, the health care bill is being redebated this morning, not being repealed. Whatever the House does to try to repeal the Act today or tomorrow will definitely die in the Senate, so remember that as you listen to the sound and fury. Sound and fury that is already useless and a waste of tax dollars. And one that doesn’t do anything to create a job, heal the economy or even to reduce the deficit.
A piece in Forbes recently works from an LA Times article that reports that early provisions of the ACA are definitely working:
The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.
The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.
Why?
Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.
To be sure, the full data are not in (and won’t be until well after Tax Day), but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the small employers targeted by the tax credit for new purchases of insurance are taking advantage of it (from the LA Times article):
Coventry Health Care Inc., an insurer in Maryland that focuses on small businesses, signed contracts to cover 115,000 new workers in the first nine months of this year, an 8% jump.
In California, Warner Pacific Insurance Services in Westlake Village, a major servicer of insurance brokers, has seen business grow more than 10% this year, a company executive said.
And Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, the largest insurer in the Kansas City, Mo., area, is reporting a 58% jump in the number of small businesses buying insurance since April, the first full month after the legislation was signed into law.
The independent nonprofit insurer has been particularly aggressive in marketing the new tax credit, which can mean a discount of as much as 35% for very small companies with low payrolls.
“One of the biggest problems in the small-group market is affordability,” said Ron Rowe, who oversees small-group sales for the insurer. “We looked at the tax credit and said, ‘This is perfect.'”
Small firms are signing up for employee coverage in the midst of the recession, but have found enough incentive in the tax credit portion of this bill to be able to make this investment in their employees. Remember this when you hear over and over again that there is something *job killing* about the ACA. Rather than harming businesses, small business owners are finding these provisions of the ACA helpful in expanding benefits for their employees AND certainly the new business isn’t hurting a single insurance company. In addition — large employers with large numbers of low-income employees (crazy, but another subject) got waivers from the Obama Administration that allow them to continue to offer the health care they currently offer (quite inadequate) until the subsidies like the small businesses have now and the exchanges come into effect in 2014. For those employers, the expectation was that they would either drop the coverage that they currently offer to these employees. And there isn’t much about tax credits actually working that counts as *socialism*.
And while I’m at it, you may want to have this piece from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities debunking the misinformation the GOP is spreading to try to redebate the ACA this week.