I'm not so sure about the poorly part. There clearly was a lot of compromising that went into this, as greyhame points out above. In fact, he reminded me what I thought of when I first heard of this plan. This is a creeping bit of the "ownership society" in action. What I don't see--and it may be that I haven't looked hard enough--is a statistical analysis. The costs are shifting around and there's a lot of uncertainty for small employers and those with medium incomes. Whether or not this is a good change will not only come on the top-note number of those insured by the plan as of it's adoption but also the longer term increase or decrease in small employers providing insurance, middle-income workers able to stay insured, population and employment changes as a result. (Sheesh. The numbers on the Social Security destruction plan were trivial compared to this--as I'm writing this I'm realizing how many variables there are.)

I'm subject to these changes because I'm employed in Massachusetts, of course. I was just explaining to New Guy (who is, of course, thirty and obliviously healthy) that if things take another downturn here, our employer could easily pony up $300/head and leave the 3,000 or so of us on our own to contract for health insurance since they pay far more than that now. (He doesn't see this as a bad thing.) Granted, that would cause a serious brain drain. But that would mean I could only get a NH policy, which would be somewhat suckier in their protections than the corresponding MA policy would be, depending on the insurer. (Live healthy or die. Heh. HCHP has a common policy for individuals, as I recall, since it's regional. BCBS, which I'm stuck with as of this year, actually writes different individual policies for NH and MA. They're technically separate companies in those two states.)