The AP reported yesterday, “Nearly one in 10 midsize or large employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014, according to a survey from a large benefits consultant. Towers Watson also found in a survey completed last month that an additional 20% of companies are unsure about what they will do. . . . Employer-sponsored health insurance has long been the backbone of the nation’s health insurance system. But the studies suggest some employers, especially retailers or those paying low wages, feel they will be better off paying fines and taxes than continuing to provide benefits that eat up a growing portion of their budget every year.”

This is something Republicans warned about as Democrats were jamming through their unpopular health care bill. Yet President Obama insisted, “If you like your current [health care] plan, you will be able to keep it. Let me repeat that:  if you like your plan, you’ll be able to keep it.” And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, “In fact, one of our core principles is that if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.”

As Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said in the wake of the Democrat health care bill’s passage last year, “The fact of the matter is, the list of failed promises is growing every day. They called us alarmists for saying businesses would dump employees from their insurance plan. Yet now it’s being reported that some of the nation’s biggest employers are seriously considering cutting employee health care and paying the lower-cost penalties instead, just like we predicted. There goes the President’s vow that ‘if you like the plan you have, you can keep it.’ . . . For every promise that crumbles, another one of our warnings is vindicated. Day after day, Republicans said the health care bill would raise taxes, raise premiums, and cut Medicare for seniors. We said it would increase costs, because it didn’t take an actuary to figure that you don’t save money on health care by spending more on it. . . . [A]ll these headlines are only confirming what the American people already believed, and what Republicans said, all along: that more government isn’t the solution to out-of-control health care spending any more than spending money we didn’t have on projects we didn’t need was the secret to robust job growth.”

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