OCare and UPS (Goodbye Spouses)

ObamaCare's Latest Outrage

Posted 08/21/2013 06:40 PM ET

Health Reform: Thousands of UPS workers have found out what's actually in that Obama-Care package Democrats shipped out in 2010. Their company decided to drop coverage for spouses to avoid the law's added costs.

President Obama has been claiming lately that most of his signature law is already in place, and that all the fuss about delays and premium hikes is over parts of the law that don't go into effect until next year and are relevant only to the small share of uninsured.

"For the 85% to 90% of Americans who already have health insurance," he says, "they don't have to worry about anything else."

Tell that to the 15,000 UPS workers who recently learned that the shipping giant is dropping coverage for husbands and wives who can get insurance from another employer.

A chief reason for the change? The added costs ObamaCare is imposing, including the mandate that plans cover children up to age 26, its ban on lifetime spending limits, and the $65 in ObamaCare fees that will be imposed on every enrollee starting next year.

Rising medical costs, "combined with the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost," UPS told its employees in a memo.

As Kaiser Health News reports, many of these spouses will end up on worse health plans.

This is just the beginning. While almost no large companies excluded spouses from coverage three years ago, 6% did last year, according to Mercer. And many others are making such coverage exorbitantly costly in the hope that spouses will drop it on their own.

Once the ObamaCare exchanges are open, the incentive to dump spouses will be even greater. After all, why should companies bear such costs when they know spouses can get coverage "guaranteed" — and likely subsidized by taxpayers — in one of the exchanges?

This is, of course, just the latest revelation about the ill effects ObamaCare is causing among the 85% who Obama says have nothing to worry about from the law.

Companies are already cutting part-time worker hours to get below the new 30-hour workweek rule imposed by Obama's regulators. Or they're moving full-time workers to part time to avoid the eventual employer mandate.

As IBD reported last week, four industries that employ lots of low-wage workers have seen an historic drop in the workweek, thanks to ObamaCare.

In other evidence of harm, a recent Chamber of Commerce survey found that nearly three quarters of businesses it queried say

ObamaCare will make it harder to grow their businesses, and the American Action Forum calculates that ObamaCare will impose $30 billion in compliance costs on businesses — money that will eventually come out of workers' pockets.

Despite what the president claims, there is no escape from ObamaCare's punishing effects. Don't think so? Just ask your UPS delivery man the next time he drops off a package.