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WIP Paper - Health Care Reform and its Downstream Accounting Impacts

Starting my second paper tonight that will focus on yet another topic within health care reform. This time I'd like to focus on a US tradition/oddity that has morphed into the basis for healthcare legislation: employer backed health care plans. In the paper, I plan to discuss where this idea originated and why we have kept healthcare tied to employment in this country for so long. Who was influential in keeping it this way from the business world, worker unions, Congress? In addition, I will look at some down stream impacts of this, specifically the new controversial write downs of deferred tax assets by large companies like AT&T, Catepillar, etc. in an attempt to estimate their liabilities to their thousands of employees as an effect of healthcare legislation.

“Obamacare has taken the most idiosyncratic feature of American health care—the fact that the onus for providing health insurance falls first and foremost on companies rather than individuals or the government—and set it in concrete. America is the only rich country that makes use of this halfway house of a system.” – The Economist March 27, 2010

posted by Ashley @ 9:49 PM