Suckers!

Remember, "If you like your plan you can keep your plan?"

Except that,

Walgreen Co. (WAG), the biggest U.S. drugstore chain, will move its workers into a private health insurance exchange to buy company-subsidized coverage, the latest sign of how the debate over Obamacare is accelerating a historic shift in corporate health-care coverage.

Walgreen’s decision affects about 160,000 current employees and follows similar action this year by Sears Holdings Corp. (SHLD) and Darden Restaurants Inc. (DRI) As an alternative to administering a traditional health plan, all three will send their employees to an exchange run byAon Plc. (AON) Fourteen more companies will join in 2014 when 600,000 people will participate, Aon said.

There is more,

Other large employers, including International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Time Warner Inc. have this year moved their retirees into private exchanges from company-picked plans. Trader Joe’s Co., the closely held grocery store chain, has said it will move part-time workers at its 400 stores onto the Obamacare exchanges, and United Parcel Service Inc. decided to drop health benefits for 15,000 of its workers’ spouses who can get insurance through another company.

What Obamacare has done is give large employers an off ramp from providing healthcare for their employees and approbation and a mechanism for shifting healthcare cost increases onto their workforce.

CBS This Morning’s Jill Schlesinger calls this “a big deal,” and points out that this gets Walgreens and other corporate employers off the hook for compliance costs:

“I can’t see how this is going to be good for the employee in the future,” Schlesinger adds, given the CBO projection yesterday of health-care cost escalation over the next twenty years.

Once Obama's politically calculated delay in the implementation of the majority of the provisions of the horribly misnamed (unless you are big business) Affordable Care Act runs out after next year's mid-term elections, it will get even worse. Bloomberg news calls the current defections an "Exodus." The metaphor train will bridge to deluges and floods of corporate defectors. The big companies love Obama, they love him so much. 

Suckers!