Health & Fitness
Fixing the "Affordable" Patient Care Act
Whether or not one is a supporter of the “Affordable” Patient Care Act, reasonable people should be able to agree that there are flaws in the omnibus legislation, some of which being:
Find out what's happening in Upper St. Clairwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
- An incentive for companies to reduce employees’ hours to below thirty per week and to keep their payrolls below fifty so as to be exempt from coverage;
- An incentive to discontinue employer-provided health insurance, enabling participants to be dumped into government exchanges (The Home Depot recently announced that this is what it will do with 20,000 of its workers);
Find out what's happening in Upper St. Clairwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
- A penalty which is too small for those that elect not to acquire health insurance, making it worth their while to take their chances and not purchase it until they become ill;
- A new 2.3 % tax on medical device manufacturers, which has been condemned on a bipartisan basis in Congress, and which will stifle innovation.
Efforts to repeal the legislation in its entirety is silly: a waste of time which serves to foster even more disharmony in Congress, but how about replacing the many defective segments of the bill with provisions that will make it less likely to crumble under its own weight?
