Employees to Face Obamacare Sticker Shock

As government's meddling in the healthcare sector expands, things get even more crazy. Your part of premiums paid for healthcare insurance will not go down, but your deductible is likely to soar.

From Reuters:

Visit to New York City orthopedist: $223. One X-ray: $50. One follow-up magnetic resonance imaging test: $766. Total bill for checking out that aching shoulder: $1,039 - all to be paid by the patient, rather than the insurer.

Healthcare has gone retail.

Over the next 18 months, between one quarter and one half of Americans who get insurance coverage through their employers will pay more of their doctor bills themselves as companies roll out healthcare plans with higher deductibles, benefits consultants say. The result: sticker shock...

...corporate America's adoption of high-deductible plans is accelerating, partly because of Obama's healthcare reform, which requires insurance plans to provide more expansive coverage such as preventive care...

Several industry surveys forecast a two-percentage-point increase in the number of companies offering only high-deductible plans in 2013 to about 19 percent, and a larger jump of anywhere from 5 to 25 percentage points in 2014.

"2013 is almost a calm period before a period of intense change in 2014," according to Randall Abbott of Towers Watson & Co, a Boston-based senior consulting leader at the human resources firm.

Got that?  Much higher deductibles, but premiums climbing. Michael Tanner reports:

Individuals will also end up paying more. Already, ObamaCare has increased insurance premiums by 2%-4%. And the government’s own actuaries project that, in the future, premiums will rise by 7.9% per year, roughly twice as fast as they would have without ObamaCare.