Reason #287 Why I Love To Blog - April 14, 2016

This is just so incredibly cool and why I love to blog. Just a few hours ago in a meandering note, I noted that it will be hard for Congress to end ObamaCare. I wrote:

ObamaCare has now become a central part of the US healthcare industry; it's like six years old. People are finally starting to get the hang of it. Businesses are finally learning to cope with it (changing hiring practices, changing hours of employment). The healthcare industry is coping with it (United Health, the nation's largest insurer, is "pulling out"). To abruptly end ObamaCare would completely disrupt the status quo. I assume a lot of members of Congress are benefiting from the program.

I could have added that corporations are moving their retirees off their health-care programs; I've talked about that before.

Now Reuters writes, just five hours ago, employer health benefits for US retirees keep declining. Corporations are moving retirees off their company-sponsored plans, giving them some cash instead and moving them to the ObamaCare exchanges. GE, who just announced they are moving from Connecticut to Boston is doing just that:

The latest poster child for this type of change is General Electric Co, which disclosed in its annual report for 2015 that it is saving $3.3 billion by sending many of its retirees into insurance exchanges with a subsidy to purchase coverage. The changes were effective on January 1, 2016.

GE's move has prompted two lawsuits. One was by salaried workers claiming that the company broke promises it made to continue coverage and that it violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The second suit was filed by a coalition of unions representing GE workers, and it claims that the change violates collective bargaining agreements. In the first case, a judge already has denied a GE motion for dismissal, but the company is also seeking dismissal of the case brought by the unions.

My hunch is GE will lose this particular battle, but will eventually win the war. 

More from the article:

A growing number of U.S. employers are capping their risk of rising health insurance costs by sending retirees into private exchanges to buy coverage - often with little advance warning.

Two-thirds (67%) of employers provided retiree health coverage as recently as 1988, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. This was usually supplemental coverage to pay for prescription drugs, cap out-of-pocket expenses or to cover Medicare's deductibles and co-pays.

By last year, that number had dwindled to just 23 percent.