Universal Studios Cutting Health Insurance For Part Timers

That’s Obamacare for you. Making health insurance better by making it more expensive and harder to get:

Universal Orlando plans to stop offering medical insurance to part-time employees beginning next year, a move the resort says has been forced by the federal government’s health-care overhaul.

The giant theme-park resort, which generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue, began informing employees this month that it will offer health-insurance to part-timers “only until December 31, 2013.”

According to Universal, they have to cut the plans because Obamacare makes them illegal:

Universal currently offers part-time workers a limited insurance plan that has low premiums but also caps the payout of benefits. For instance, Universal’s plan costs about $18 a week for employee-only coverage but covers only a maximum of $5,000 a year toward hospital stays. There are similar caps for other services.

Those types of insurance plans — sometimes referred to as “mini-med” plans — will no longer be permitted under the federal Affordable Care Act. Beginning in 2014, the law will prohibit insurance plans that impose annual monetary limits on essential medical care such, as hospitalization, or on overall spending.

Many of these employees will no doubt be moved to government-subsidized medical plans, which was the real intent of Obamacare from the beginning. It wasn’t about making private health insurance less expensive and easier to get. It was about making private health insurance more expensive, and harder to get, in order to push people onto government health care programs which, in turn, is another step toward the sort of top-down, government-run “universal” health care system the left has wanted all along.