Part of the plan

Democrats get quite testy when large employers hint that ObamaCare might compel them to scale back and eventually drop medical benefits for employees. But the left's bluster is all for show.

The slow death of private health insurance is all part of their plan.

For nearly a year now, businesses have been crunching the numbers on the bottom-line impact of the legislative remake of American health care. Are our benefits so generous that we'll have to pay the "Cadillac tax" starting in 2018? How much will our costs go up when all the law's mandates take effect? Will our workers get a better deal buying coverage from the insurance exchanges that will be created as a result of the law? Will we be more profitable if we drop medical benefits, lose our tax deduction and pay a $2,000-per-worker fine to the federal government?

An untold number of businesses have responded by boosting employees' premium costs and co-pays. And even then, covering people with pre-existing conditions and employees' children well into their 20s still might break the bank.

Dropping coverage altogether and taking a tax hit provides a lot more cost certainty than seeing how this boondoggle plays out.

Last week, Boeing announced that its 90,000 nonunion workers would have to pay "significantly more" for health insurance as a direct result of ObamaCare. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius harshly criticized the company in response, as she did when other corporations reported billions of dollars in writedowns earlier this year. The Obama administration still insists, despite these developments, that its health care law is good for business and will reduce costs.

Unlike politicians, the numbers here don't lie.

The president, Sen. Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Ms. Sebelius couldn't sell their bill on a promise of undercutting and eliminating employer plans. They also knew that they couldn't transition hundreds of millions of people into a single-payer system -- the real end game -- all at once. This was the lesson of HillaryCare's 1994 collapse.

So they crafted a plan that would gradually remove people from private insurance and put them into public and quasi-public systems. Eventually, private health insurers and employers will be so burdened with expensive coverage mandates they won't be able to turn a profit. Medical benefits will go the way of the dinosaurs.

The dominoes are falling. It's all part of the plan.