Op-Eds and Blogs

The Washington Post reports that Obamacare gives small businesses one more reason not to hire more people. While the law eases its harsh penalties when it comes to businesses with fewer than 50 employees, regulators are adding up all the employees of separate businesses that share an owner. The Post reports: “The aggregation rules pose an addition compliance headache for a large number of small business owners. In fact, roughly four out of 10 small firms with at least 20 employees are run by employers who own at least 10 percent of at least one other company, according to research by the National Federation of Independent Business. “Due to the complicated nature of the rules, many of those firms will be forced to hire a tax attorney to determine their size status under the law, according to Debbie Walker, a Washington accountant who testified at the hearing.

Liberals seem to be grasping for any ray of hope now that Obamacare has turned out to be such a bust. After epic incompetence at building a website, more than 5 million people losing their insurance, and skyrocketing costs and deductibles, the president’s fans need a good story. Any story will do. So some are cheering that a conservative Republican – “far right,” as one progressive insider said – liked something about Obamacare. The Huffington Post even crowed that this conservative senator “likes a key part of Obamacare.”

Obamacare needs lots of young, healthy people to sign up – so they can be overcharged, to subsidize older people. Some commentators have hinted that this is problematic because young people tend to be uninformed about the law. Jeffrey Anderson in the Weekly Standard points out that learning more about the law probably won’t lure the young, however. The numbers make it plain how badly Obamacare cheats young people: "The findings are striking. Consider a 26-year-old (newly ineligible for Mom and Dad’s coverage) making $30,000 a year. Across these 50 counties, the average cost of the cheapest subsidized plan—the cheapest “bronze” plan—available to someone of that age from the Obama-care exchanges would be $2,134 a year. That’s roughly three times the cost of the cheapest plan this person could have bought pre-Obamacare, according to figures from the Government Accountability Office. Meanwhile, this 26-year-old’s taxpayer-funded subsidy, on average, would be $482, or just 23 percent of the premium. By contrast, a 61-year-old making that same $30,000 would, on average, get a subsidy of $4,018, covering 82 percent of the $4,885 premium for someone of that age.