Firms Punt Health Plans -- The WSJ

The MDW has been reporting this for at least a year.

At the end of the day, investors are going to do very, very well with O'BamaCare. The federal health program will be a trainwreck for millions of Americans, but investors are going to do quite well.

Top story in the second section of today's Wall Street Journal: firms punt health plans.

The nation's largest provider of security guards plans to discontinue its lowest-cost health plans and steer roughly 55,000 workers to new government-sponsored insurance exchanges for coverage next year, in the latest sign of the fraying ties between employment and health care.

The U.S. arm of Sweden's Securitas AB is among more than 1,200 employers that offer the kind of bare-bones health plans that must be phased out beginning Jan. 1 under the health-care law. Nearly four million people are enrolled in these so-called mini-med plans, which cap benefits to participants, sometimes at as little as $3,000 a year.

"The mini-meds go away and we're not replacing them," said Jim McNulty, a spokesman for Securitas's U.S. operation. "Their option is to go to the exchanges."

Other big employers, including Darden Restaurants Inc., Home Depot Inc. and Trader Joe's Co., say they will stop offering health insurance to part-time workers, and will direct those employees to the state exchanges. Darden, Home Depot and Trader Joe's previously offered mini-meds to their part timers.

There are a number of story lines here; I don't have time to go into them all -- I've touched on them numerous times in the past, but O'BamaCare is going to be bigger than anyone realizes. 

I track O'BamaCare cost shifting here, but I may quit. I certainly won't be posting all examples. The trend is obvious. Any company not moving their employees to O'BamaCare will regret it. My hunch is that Warren Buffett is directing all his companies to move their employees to O'BamaCare as fast as they can. Jack Welch, if he were still at GE, would have done this Day 1.

Deep in the story, this bombshell:

In July the Obama administration may have inadvertently opened a window for some companies to drop coverage by imposing a yearlong delay on penalties for employers that don't offer health insurance.

Until then, Securitas executives said, they had planned to offer guards a health plan with more benefits, but which would have required employees to pay more to participate. Executives subsequently changed course, deciding not to offer insurance to most guards next year, and to develop offerings that comply with the health law for 2015.