[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11579-11580]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               OBAMACARE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Thompson) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, in May of 2012, the House 
Ways and Means Committee released a report that expounds upon one of 
the most problematic provisions included in ObamaCare, the mandate on 
employers with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees to offer 
``affordable'' and government-approved health insurance plans to their 
workers beginning in 2014.
  Employers with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees who do not 
offer government-approved coverage must

[[Page 11580]]

pay $2,000 in fines annually per employee. After 2014, the fine would 
be indexed to the average per capita premium for health insurance, as 
determined by the Health and Human Services Secretary.
  Even if employers do offer government-approved health insurance 
coverage, they would still be fined if Health and Human Services deems 
the plan ``unaffordable'' and at least one full-time employee purchases 
a qualified health plan through an exchange and receives a taxpayer-
funded subsidy for their coverage.
  Seventy-one Fortune 100 companies that responded to the Ways and 
Means Committee survey included in the 2012 report estimate that they 
could save $28.6 billion in 2014 by eliminating health insurance 
coverage for their 5.9 million employees and opting to pay the $2,000 
annual fine per employee. This would impact more than 10.2 million 
employees and dependents on employer-based plans. Under these 
estimates, from 2014 through 2023, the employers surveyed could save an 
estimated $422.4 billion.
  The employer mandate provides a perverse incentive for companies to 
drop their employees from health plans that are otherwise working and 
are embraced by the employees themselves. This is a stark contrast from 
the promises made by President Obama, suggesting ``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.''
  Mr. Speaker, as we are seeing, that is simply not true. But 
furthermore, the employer mandate will serve to drive up the costs of 
ObamaCare as more and more people become a part of the exchanges.
  Even Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, in an interview with Health and 
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this past January, posed the 
question as to whether or not the employee mandate would cause 
employers to ``dump'' employees into the exchanges until it ``becomes 
sort of a back door of government--not a takeover necessarily, but of a 
government responsibility for the health care, and then suddenly, 
obviously then, we're Sweden.''
  Mr. Speaker, this week the House will vote to legitimize the 
administration's delay of the employer mandate for 1 year. While I 
support this delay, we must continue to focus efforts on repealing and 
replacing ObamaCare so that we can begin to reduce the escalating 
health care costs and the restrictions on access, the attacks on 
quality innovation in this country and the turnover of health care from 
a personal decision to the government.

                          ____________________