Portable Health Insurance: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

February 22 01:00 2016 by ushadmin

Do you know what is the most severe fine, penalty or punitive tax imposed under Obamacare?

There are a lot of candidates to choose from. Individuals can be fined if they don’t insure. They can pay higher taxes if they don’t guess next year’s income correctly or if they fail to fill out the proper tax forms or if they fail to file a tax return at all. Employers are subject to fines if they don’t offer health insurance, if they offer the wrong kind of insurance or if the premium they charge their employees is too high.

Yet none of these penalties even begins to match the cost the Obama administration threatens to impose on employers who give employees the one kind of health insurance they seem to most want: insurance they can take with them from job to job.

Suppose an employer that has been providing Blue Cross group insurance opts instead to provide Blue Cross individual insurance to each employee. The administrative costs and the premiums would be about the same. So why do it? Because employees would then have something much more valuable: insurance they could keep after they leave to take to another job or to drop out of the labor market altogether to raise a family, take care of a relative or retire. Further, when people have portable insurance they have continuity of insurance. That, in turn, leads to continuity of care – which is almost always better care.