“Let me be exactly clear about what health care reform means to you,” the president told residents of the Garden State. “First of all, if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”
But last month, as the president acknowledged during a press conference, he doesn’t literally mean that you are guaranteed to be able to keep your health care plan, and your doctor, if and when health care reform passes.
“When I say ‘If you have your plan and you like it,… or you have a doctor and you like your doctor, that you don't have to change plans,’” the president said after we asked him about this, “what I'm saying is the government is not going to make you change plans under health reform.”
Exactly. We “can” keep our plans. They’ll just be unaffordable or someone else will make decisions that prevent us from keeping our plans. Employers, like MacDonalds in this ad, are not forced by the government to drop their plans. They will do so because it will be less expensive for them to do so.
In this case, the problem isn’t with McDonalds; it’s with their insurance carrier. The government says that all the premium money collected from employees must go 85% to coverage. The insurance company says it doesn’t like that because their costs are higher due to contant worker turnover in a business like McDonalds.
They probably are higher. The insurance company wants to keep its profit margin at a certain level.
The only way to do that would be for the corporation to begin paying the insrance company beyond what the worker premiums are, since any worker premium cost increase would still have to be spent 85% on actual coverage.