Many employers, such as McDonald’s, provide health benefits that are less comprehensive than most.  They may have an annual claims limit of $10,000 or less.  But if you’re young, healthy, and need to pinch your pennies, that may suit you just fine.  According to Jerry Newman, a SUNY-Buffalo professor who wrote a book about working at McDonald’s, “For those who didn’t have health insurance through their spouse, it was a life saver.”

These are the health plans (and the workers) that are seeing the highest premium increases under ObamaCare.  The Wall Street Journal reports:

Trade groups representing restaurants and retailers say low-wage employers might halt their coverage if the government doesn’t loosen a requirement for “mini-med” plans, which offer limited benefits to some 1.4 million Americans…

McDonald’s, in a memo to federal officials, said “it would be economically prohibitive for our carrier to continue offering” the mini-med plan unless it got an exemption from the requirement to spend 80% to 85% of premiums on benefits…”Having to drop our current mini-med offering would represent a huge disruption to our 29,500 participants,” said McDonald’s memo…

Insurers say dozens of other employers could find themselves in the same situation as McDonald’s. Aetna Inc., one of the largest sellers of mini-med plans, provides the plans to Home Depot Inc., Disney Worldwide Services, CVS Caremark Corp., Staples Inc. and Blockbuster Inc., among others, according to an Aetna client list obtained by the Journal. Aetna also covers AmeriCorps teaching-program sponsors, who are required by law to make health coverage available.

Aetna declined to comment; it has previously indicated that the requirement could hurt its limited benefit plans.

“There is not any issuer of limited benefit coverage that could meet the enhanced MLR standards,” said Neil Trautwein, a vice president at the National Retail Federation, using the abbreviation for medical loss ratio.

Yet again, we have evidence that President Obama’s oft-repeated pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” should have come with a disclaimer: Offer not valid for low-income workers.

Not to fear, says the Obama administration. According to Bloomberg:

The government may allow some low-cost plans like those offered at McDonald’s, which have limited benefits, to get waivers from the health law’s insurance requirements, according to a Sept. 3 Health and Human Services memo. Those requirements were waived for McDonald’s on Sept. 24, [HHS spokeswoman Jessica] Santillo said.

Sorry, but I don’t find it comforting that ObamaCare gives HHS the power to waive these regulations on a case-by-case basis.  Power corrupts.  We’ve already seen HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius use other powers granted her by ObamaCare to threaten insurers who contradict the party line about the law’s cost.  The waiver power gives her another club to use against insurers and employers who complain about the law or donate to the wrong political campaigns.  (Will Home Depot, Disney, CVS, Staples, or Blockbuster dare to misbehave?)

Any such criticism now triggers an autonomic reflex among administration spokesmen where they regurgitate the lines, “Americans have seen what happens when insurance companies have free rein. The Affordable Care Act ends insurance companies’ worst abuses.”

As if giving bureaucrats free rein to engage in abusive government practices is an improvement.

During the (initial) congressional debate over ObamaCare, President Obama vilified Anthem Blue Cross of California for a 39 percent rate increase.  On Wednesday, the Hartford Courant reported that ObamaCare itself may increase premiums by similar amounts:

Health insurers are asking for immediate rate hikes of more than 20 percent in Connecticut for some plans, citing rising medical costs and federal health reform laws as reasons…

In what might appear to be an oddity, companies are citing a huge range of effects that the health care reform mandates will have on plan prices — from near zero to well over 20 percent. The reason is that among all the plans, some already deliver the provisions required by health reform, while others do not…

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut, by far the largest insurer of Connecticut residents, said in a letter that it expects the federal health reform law to increase rates by as much as 22.9 percent for just a single provision — removing annual spending caps. The mandate to provide benefits to children regardless of pre-existing conditions will raise premiums by 4.8 percent, Anthem said in the letter. Mandated preventive care with no deductibles would raise rates by as much as 8.5 percent, Anthem said.

It was unclear how those separate factors would add up for Anthem’s plans, but those potential increases were all on top of rising medical costs.

If those increases are cumulative, ObamaCare could increase premiums for some Connecticut residents by more than 36 percent.

Compare that to what President Obama said in his weekly radio address on February 20:

The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping. Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent…

And as bad as things are today, they’ll only get worse if we fail to act… We’ll see exploding premiums and out-of-pocket costs burn through more and more family budgets.

It sure seems like President Obama promised that ObamaCare would make things better.  Instead, it pushed us out of the frying pan and into the fire.

HHS Secretary Katheleen Sebelius said that Anthem Blue Cross of California’s 39 percent rate increase “just doesn’t make a lot of sense to people across America.”  She said those “extraordinary” increases threaten “to make health care unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Californians, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in a difficult economy.”  Will she say the same about ObamaCare’s premium increases?  Or will she threaten to put Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Connecticut out of business for its insolence?

The following analogy may help to explain why everyone should be troubled by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ efforts to intimidate insurance companies who say unflattering things about ObamaCare.

Last month, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R), issued an opinion that state regulatory boards already have the authority to impose additional regulations on abortion clinics.  Critics pounced, claiming that the measure could shut down 17 of the state’s 21 clinics. What if Cuccinelli responded with a letter threatening to investigate clinics that “misinform” the public about the costs of such regulation?