Employers Forced To Choose Between Job Cuts Or Dropping Health Coverage

President Obama: If You Like Your Healthcare Coverage, You Can Keep It:

“At the same time -- I just want to be completely clear about this; I keep on saying this but somehow folks aren't listening -- if you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan.  Nobody is going to force you to leave your health care plan.” (Remarks by the President, 8/15/09, accessed on whitehouse.gov 5/6/2010)

RED ALERT: …Unless My Healthcare Takeover Forces Your Employer to Cut Coverage In Order to Stay In Business:

“The great mystery surrounding the historic health care bill is how the corporations that provide coverage for most Americans -- coverage they know and prize -- will react to the new law's radically different regime of subsidies, penalties, and taxes. Now, we're getting a remarkable inside look at the options AT&T, Deere, and other big companies are weighing to deal with the new legislation. Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill's critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government. That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama's statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we'll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America's employers would remain the backbone of the nation's health care system.” (Shawn Tully, “AT&T, Verizon, Others Thought About Dropping Health Plans,” CNNMoney.com, 5/6/2010)