It was announced Tuesday that 18 states would not be able to meet Obamacare guidelines for their respective Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) exchanges. What does this mean for the small-business employees who want to purchase insurance through these exchanges? It means that they will only have a single “option” for insurance, rather than the "employee choice" that was supposed to be in place for 2015.
Having only one choice is a familiar situation for those who live in communist and socialist countries, but up until recently, it wasn't something with which most Americans were familiar. Choices abound in vehicles, breakfast cereals and clothing—all goods in which the free market has significant impact—yet for a growing sector of the market (especially health care and education) choice is being supplanted by the monotonous unanimity of governmental dictates.
According to its proponents, Obamacare was supposed to be a compromise between the single-payer health care systems that socialist utopians so admire, and free market health care based on individual choice and prioritization; but so far the implementation looks distinctly more like the former than the latter.
In their haste to provide universal health coverage—which, as it turns out, does not actually equate to universal health care—the utopians have unleashed a full-scale assault against one of America's foundation values: individual choice. Although this charge may have appeared excessive a few years ago, after “passing the bill to see what was in it,” we now have our answer.
So what will you choose, Obamacare or Obamacare?
