Reality VS. The Narrative of Health Care Reform or Why the ACA is Better then McDonald’s Health Insurance
Nice little post on Balloon Juice which takes on McDonald’s claim that they need an exemption from the new Affordable Care Act:
So the big Wall Street Journal article today is about fast-food giant, McDonald’s, threatening that new provisions in the Affordable Care Act will mean that they may need to dump healthcare coverage for thousands of employees…..
I went over to the Kaiser Family Foundation to take a look at what I might qualify for under the healthcare law if I were a single McDonald’s worker (using 2014 dollars). Generously assuming I’d make $10/hour (I believe shift managers make about $9.81/hour) I calculate my yearly salary at $20,800 – or about 181% of poverty.
Turns out I’ll be on the hook for a premium of about $1127 a year, or about $21 per week. That’s $11 less a week than I’d pay for McDonald’s mini-med benefits. But instead of yearly maximum benefit of $10,000 I’d have no maximum benefit at all since maximum benefits are no longer legal. And I’d only have a maximum out-of-pocket expense of $2,083. This plan – a ‘silver’ plan under the new law – is going to be quite a lot better than McDonald’s, actually……
McDonald’s could also take advantage of the free choice vouchers built into the law (another fingerprint of the excellent Ron Wyden) which allow people to opt into the exchanges even if their employer provides coverage.
For some reason these threats from companies like McDonalds seem more like extortion to me or a way to make sure the ACA is repealed.