Unintended Consequences

My wife used to own a franchise for a national temporary employment agency. She closed it at the beginning of this year because of the lousy economy and lack of business in the "affected area". But she still keeps in touch with her friends in the business and she heard the other day that company headquarters had cancelled the health insurance plan for their temporary employees.

One of the items in Obama's new budget plan (the one that nobody read) was that health care providers would have to pay 65% of the cost of the COBRA for a laid off employee thereby reducing the employee's cost to 35%. (Previously the employee paid up to 102% of the cost). The idea was to make health care affordable for laid off employees. Unfortunately, the end result seems to be that now nobody will have health insurance benefits.

So, Obama institutes a plan to make health care more affordable to laid off employees but ends up having health insurance cancelled for all employees.

Was this the change you expected?