re: Re: Obamacare; Walmart cuts insurance benefits for 30k employees

quote:

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I don't know if it's for profit, or they're just trying to control their costs.

All I'm pointing out is that the more government interferes in the Market the more Business will find a way to get around it. Prior to ACA they offered Health Insurance to their PT employees, when they didn't have to. Since the ACA, those guys are losing it.

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The problem with that is that there is no direct link between the two. You may as well say "When Kim Jung Un was in power, WalMart offered insurance to part time employees. Now that he has disappeared, they are losing it."

However, WalMart does tell us why they are dropping the insurance: Because more of their employees are signing up than they wanted. They never really wanted to give insurance to the part time employees, they only wanted it to be available as a "perk" that they could offer to get people in house. However when employees saw what crap it was, they didn't sign up.

Then the ACA happened. It caused two events:
1) WalMart could no longer offer crap insurance. So the "insurance" policies had to actually become something of value, for which WalMart raised the costs.
2) In spite of the increased costs, the insurance policies became something of value enough that more employees bought it at the higher price than did when it was cheaper. WalMart didn't really want this because then it would actually have to contribute to health plans for a good chunk of employees.

In short: Employees aren't losing their crap insurance from before. They wanted real insurance which WalMart offered for a year until people actually signed up for it.