Need Help Debunking Latest Obamacare Attack

[ChoppinBroccoli]

A person I knew in high school posted this crap on her Facebook page today. I would love to shoot it down in flames because I know it's untrue (especially considering the source), but I haven't found anything on Snopes debunking it. Can anyone here give me some slam-dunk information to take this nonsense and turn it into a smoking hole? I'm sick of my Facebook page being littered with right-wing talking points. Here's what she wrote:

"UPS has dumped eligible spouses of employees from coverage, many retailers are dropping front line employees to 'technically' part-time hours to drop them from health insurance plans, and now big blue has to drop retirees.

Welcome to a nationalized health care system folks. MMM-mmm how does forced socialism taste? We haven't yet come under the effects of this monstrosity and it's already a cluster-****"

And this is the link she provided (notice it's Faux News, which already tells me its B.S.): http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/07/ibm-to-move-retirees-off-health-plan/?intcmp=trending

[bhikkhu]

1. Employee sponsored health care has been shedding coverage for over a decade

that's one of the direct causes of the "health care crisis" that led to the ACA. Health care costs haven't gone down, and plenty of employers will still jump at any opportunity to shed coverage, limit costs, and blame it on Obama.

In any case, the USPS only dropped coverage for spouses who had other coverage already available to them. Nobody loses health care coverage because of it, and when the ACA kicks in the whole thing will be quickly forgotten distraction, a non-story.

In my state the exchanges open up in 24 days, and I'll be signing my family up for affordable health care, which we haven't had in 10 years. It hard and worrisome raising kids without coverage; little things like joining sports they didn't do, because any injury would likely have meant bankruptcy, or losing our house.

[bluestate10]

4. That is exactly right. What the employers have been doing was shift costs over to

employees and retirees, with the Federal government picking up a good portion of the increase for retirees through Medicare.

[NV Whino]

2. Retailers have cut employee hours to under 40 for a long time

Big Blue has taken their retirees off health insurance plans and are giving vouchers toward independent carriers — read Medigap. It's is nothing new. Other companies have been doing the same. Several threads on DU. Don,t know about UPS.

[bluestate10]

3. The change has NOTHING to do with Obamacare.

Some large companies use private exchanges to handle retiree medical care. This system existed before Obamacare was even approved. Go to the attached link and read the whole new article.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/07/ibm-retirees-health-plan/2780739

[silverweb]

5. You can probably find some answers here:

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]http://www.obamacarefacts.com

The site also has a FB page, where I'm sure you can ask questions and get helpful answers.

[zipplewrath]

6. You can blame anything you want

Look, Obamacare changed the rules. So anyone can claim that the reason they are changing the cost/rules/availability/coverage is because of Obamacare. But as many people have pointed out, many of the things that people are blaming on Obamacare were things that were already happening, now they just have a new excuse. If there is something to "blame" on Obamacare, it is that they couldn't have possibly think of all the ways that companies could screw over employees and customers under the new rules. And that comes from someone that isn't all that fond of Obamacare.

[SheilaT]

7. I keep on being astonished at both the ignorance out there

and the genuinely crappy health care coverage out there.

I wish all companies were like the one I work for. I am a permanent part time employee, 20 hours per week. I get full, prorated benefits. That includes leave time, holidays, and health insurance. The way it works at my company (which is a hospital, by the way) is that they guarantee that what they kick in for health insurance coverage will at least pay the basic plan. If you have a spouse with a better plan, you can forego theirs and take home a little extra money.

Me, I live alone, have no dependents. I pay about $25/paycheck additional for the premium coverage. As it happens I'm amazingly healthy, basically never use the coverage. But the once or twice I've used it, it's been very good. I have a co-worker with various health issues, including a chronic auto-immune disease, and she is also very happy with the coverage.

Why can't this model be the basic one?

Every time I see someone bitching that "I shouldn't have to pay for YOUR surgery" I get furious. Don't get me wrong. I happen (just as an example here) to be totally down on smoking and think that smokers quite frankly deserve all the bad things from it. BUT, and this is important, I don't think the smokers should be in any way exempt from full health care coverage. Yeah, they made a bad choice to smoke. But someone else made a bad choice about her genetics and now has breast cancer. Or another person made a bad choice about a job and now has an environmentally caused disease. We are all in it together. I am grateful beyond words that I am as healthy as I am. Nothing I can contribute in my taxes to pay for someone else's illness begins to hurt as much as ill health does.