Why So Shocked? You Were NEVER Meant To Keep Your Health Insurance Under #ObamaCare -- By LaborUnionRepot, RedState

It takes some time to fundamentally transform America and, while they may be wrong about
a lot of thingsalmost everything, in this instance, Democrats are right about one thing: The term transition is absolutely the correct term when discussing the debacle known as ObamaCare.

You see, while they will never openly admit it (excepting, perhaps, in the darkest recesses of some corner inside the White House or the Center of American Progress), ObamaCare was never meant for Americans to “keep their health insurance plans,” it is a transition plan to drive all Americans* to single-payer (aka nationalized or socialized) health care.

On October 15, 2008, several weeks before Barack Obama’s election and well before ObamaCare was enacted, I wrote (pre-LUR and RedState) a post entitled Obama’s Plan to Socialize Health Care.

In the post, I stated, “Within five years (if not sooner), the U.S. will have full-blown socialized medicine under President Barack Obama.”

This prediction was not based on all of the regulations that were eventually put into the Affordable Care Act–those regulations that are causing millions to lose their individual coverage and another 93 million potentially to lose their employer-sponsored health plans–but was based on simple economics.

Candidate Obama’s ‘Pay or Play’ Scheme

During the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Obama boasted of his plan to build a government program to insure the uninsured.

Obama’s plan during the campaign was called a “pay or play” plan.

His plan would to force all employers to pay 100% of their employees’ health care–OR, if they didn’t, he would require those employers to pay 6% of their payroll to “opt in” to the government’s plan.

That either-or–pay 100% of employees’ insurance or pay six percent of payroll into a government plan–was the scheme to push Americans into a government plan.

From an economic standpoint, it was (and even more so now) a ‘no brainer.’ Here’s why:

Even with many American workers already contributing a percentage to their health care premiums, most employers providing health insurance were already paying 10%, 20% or even higher percentage of their payrolls toward health insurance–and annual cost increases were often in the double digits.

Imagine, then, an employer in a highly-competitive industry (like the grocery industry, for example) paying 18% of its payroll toward employee benefits (even with employee contributions) and, suddenly, Big Brother offers a plan that costs the employer a mere six percent of payroll. What employer wouldn’t jump on that?
 
Moreover, in a highly competitive industry, once one employer dumps its employees onto the government plan, its competitors will either have to do the same, or lose market share and potentially go out of business.

Like the falling of dominoes, within a few short years everyone would be on the government’s plan.

“…[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it…”

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