Obamacare

Floor Speech

Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, in May of 2012, the House Ways and Means Committee released a report that expounds upon one of the most problematic provisions included in ObamaCare, the mandate on employers with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees to offer ``affordable'' and government-approved health insurance plans to their workers beginning in 2014.

Employers with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees who do not offer government-approved coverage must pay $2,000 in fines annually per employee. After 2014, the fine would be indexed to the average per capita premium for health insurance, as determined by the Health and Human Services Secretary.

Even if employers do offer government-approved health insurance coverage, they would still be fined if Health and Human Services deems the plan ``unaffordable'' and at least one full-time employee purchases a qualified health plan through an exchange and receives a taxpayer-funded subsidy for their coverage.

Seventy-one Fortune 100 companies that responded to the Ways and Means Committee survey included in the 2012 report estimate that they could save $28.6 billion in 2014 by eliminating health insurance coverage for their 5.9 million employees and opting to pay the $2,000 annual fine per employee. This would impact more than 10.2 million employees and dependents on employer-based plans. Under these estimates, from 2014 through 2023, the employers surveyed could save an estimated $422.4 billion.

The employer mandate provides a perverse incentive for companies to drop their employees from health plans that are otherwise working and are embraced by the employees themselves. This is a stark contrast from the promises made by President Obama, suggesting ``First of all, if you've got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.''

Mr. Speaker, as we are seeing, that is simply not true. But furthermore, the employer mandate will serve to drive up the costs of ObamaCare as more and more people become a part of the exchanges.

Even Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, in an interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this past January, posed the question as to whether or not the employee mandate would cause employers to ``dump'' employees into the exchanges until it ``becomes sort of a back door of government--not a takeover necessarily, but of a government responsibility for the health care, and then suddenly, obviously then, we're Sweden.''

Mr. Speaker, this week the House will vote to legitimize the administration's delay of the employer mandate for 1 year. While I support this delay, we must continue to focus efforts on repealing and replacing ObamaCare so that we can begin to reduce the escalating health care costs and the restrictions on access, the attacks on quality innovation in this country and the turnover of health care from a personal decision to the government.

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