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My husband's company who has been paying 100% of employee's medical insurance, now may be penalized for having insurance too good! What a mess!

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Obamacare is not an insurance plan provided by the Government. It provides a network for people to find medical insurance for their needs. Individuals select the plan that will work for them through insurance companies.

If a company changes its plans, that is a company decision to lessen their overhead. Our insurance plan where I work has changed every year for the 22 years that I have worked here, it is nothing new.

Those individuals that lost their plans had insurance plans that did not meet the new requirements. Those plans would drop you in a heartbeat if you discovered you had cancer.

The Obamacare Plan merely tightened up insurance coverage making sure everyone who wanted insurance could obtain insurance--even those with pre-existing conditions.
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My mother died in 1962 and left behind medical bills of $10,000. My dad had to put the house up for sale. When I first got health insurance in 1972, it was only catastrophic coverage, not day to day stuff. It became effective after you paid $1000 out of pocket. The next step up was insurance that only kicked in when you were hospitalized. I don't have Cadillac insurance, I have to pay $100 a month deducted from my pension, I am 62. I am eternally grateful that Obamacare made it possible for my daughter to get good coverage after her husband walked out and left her with a lapse in coverage. She pays about 1/4 of her SSDI check to keep it. On the other hand we are living too long, lives unnaturally extended by drugs. Good grief my grandparents barely made 70. Today they would make 90, but at a huge cost. People aren't allowed to die anymore. But the way we keep them alive is inhumane, strapped to beds and loaded with pills. Something has to change.
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I too just recently got insurance through Obamacare. Premiums for me and my husband, self employed at our own small business, were $1000 per MONTH, with a $5000 deductible for him and a $7500 deductible for me - meaning if we were in an accident together, we would have to pay out $12,500 before insurance would pay a dime. That's after paying a grand a month. And of course after the deductible, we still had to pay all the copays, etc. We weren't really insuring our health - we were insuring that we didn't lose our house. If you have Cadillac insurance, well, good for you, but before you bash Obamacare, put yourself in my place, or in the place of someone with a serious illness who couldn't get insurance at any price. I'm finally getting some doctor attention. Obamacare has been virtually a lifesaver for me - and yes, I pay for my premiums.
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I work for NYC; I probably have what is considered Cadilac insurance and will have to pay more for it in the future...but the fact that my 31 year old daughter, college graduate, in graduate school working babysitting/daycare jobs was able to get some decent health insurance to care for her bad back and depression is worth anything that I have to pay. Add in the fact that I don't have to worry any longer about what might happen if she got hit by a bus, had a serious infectious illness, etc. I think Obamacare is a good if not great fix. It needs tweaking no doubt. But it's a start.
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Sounds like the so-called Cadillac tax, which starts in 2018, which taxes companies that offer high-end health care plans to their employees.

You have been very lucky that your husband's company has been paying 100% of your medical insurance [I assume that means the company paid your monthly premium, paid the deductible, and paid all the co-pays].... decades ago many Fortune 500 companies offered that to employees but throughout the years slowly the employees started to pay some of the premiums, had small deductibles and may or may not have had co-pays. Those great benefits have disappeared over the past couple of decades. I'm surprised there are still companies still offers such benefits. Be thankful you have had this type of insurance for whatever amount of time you had.

I'm jealous. Back when I was self-employed, my monthly premium was $550 per month, the deductible was $2,500.00 and my co-pays were $20 for every time I walked through a doctor's door, and that was just for me alone. That was a decade ago, can't imagine what the cost would be in the past few years. Wish we had the Affordable Care Act back then, those of us who were self-employed would have had more affordable health insurance.
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the insurance industry is a bloated , parasitic mess and its a matter of time theyll be thrown out of the fray and we'll go single payer / socialistic style medicine. obama got medical records and communities digitized and online in only his first 3 years of office just like he proposed. all eyes are on the elephant in the room right now ( insurers ) and im loving it.
get a JOB baggy pants..
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I'm thrilled with the ACA. I am paying less $300 a month less for similar coverage with a lower deductible than I was paying before. AND I don't have to worry about being dumped if I get some kind of medical problem. I'm self-employed and before the ACA, I wouldn't go to the doctor for different things because I didn't want it on my record for future insurance company reference. Because they could have denied me coverage. I LOVE the ACA.
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I am sooo grateful that my self-employed artist daughter can finally afford decent health insurance. She recently had a medical problem attended to that she had suffered with for a long time.

My self-employed handy-man son is also a candidate for new health insurance. Hooray!

When I was self-employed I was paying $800 a month for insurance. I had a good gig. What struggling artist or handyman can afford that?

Our approach to healthcare is gradually shifting from "you can have only what you can afford" to "access to good healthcare is a basic human right." During this transition some who by luck of working for certain employers may get less lucky. (I don't know that, but I guess it is possible.) I am sorry about that. But that is greatly outweighed by how glad I am for people who can finally have access to our excellent but expensive healthcare system.

Is the affordable care act the end-all be-all height of perfection? Absolutely not! Is it a great step in the right direction? Oh, I don't doubt that at all.
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I don't believe that the employer gets penalized for having insurance that's "too good". that's a much too simplistic way of looking at what is going on.
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I have epilepsy, fibromyalgia, asthma, diabetes, coccydenia, Prinzmetal's angina and a mild form of cardiomyopathy. I was uninsurable except through my husbands work. He is 63 yrs old, and not in great shape himself. As he is 5 years older than me, he was going to have to work until he was 70 so I could reach retirement age - I didn't think he would last that long since his work days were typically 14hrs long/7days a week. He might get one day off every 2 weeks. I finally decided to check out the ACA, and discovered we could both get better coverage for less than what we already were paying, so he retired. It's been 3 weeks now and my husband is starting to smile again.
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