Obamacare Costs Are Shifting To Patients

The Department of Health and Human Services is prescribing an extra dose of two of ObamaCare's most bitter medicines for 2016.

The maximum deductible will rise to $6,850, up 3.8% from this year's $6,600 ceiling and about 8% above 2014's $6,350 limit.

Meanwhile, the penalty for employers that don't offer coverage to most full-timers will rise a like amount to $2,160 per employee, up from this year's $2,080 fine. The original $2,000 fine never applied, because it was bumped up a notch after a year's delay.

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In the second year of what is supposed to be an annual ritual, the Obama administration last Friday announced these key parameters for 2016 and others, including the maximum that subsidized consumers will have to pay for a benchmark silver plan.

The size of employer penalties and the limit on cost-sharing — how much an individual may have to pay out of pocket for medical costs beyond premiums — are indexed annually based on the average rise in health insurance premiums over the prior year.

Notably, the employer fine, up 8% over two years, is growing much faster than wages, which will make the mandate increasingly burdensome. Those costs "will be borne primarily by workers in the form of reductions in wages or other compensation," the Con gressional Budget Office has said.

Employers can try to dodge those costs by keeping workers below the 30-hour-per-week threshold at which ObamaCare penalties start to apply.

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