The death knell tolls for health care in America.

For decades, full time workers have depended on health insurance provided by their employers to cover their family’s health care needs.

Then along came Barack Obama and the Democrats who decided that changing history was more important than simply shoring up the financially strapped Medicare and Medicaid system, and changing the rules to allow more Americans to apply.

Now that the health care bill has passed, 4 major corporations (AT&T, Verizon, Caterpillar and Deere) plan to drop health coverage altogether for their employees — and pay a penalty to the government instead.

This action will instantly terminate insurance coverage for millions of Americans who will be forced to negotiate with ruthless insurance companies on their own.

From Hot Air:

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill’s critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government. [link]

And remember that mandate to cover “children” until they’re 26-years-old? Critics predicted this mandate would have an adverse effect on companies financially:

It’s not just the calculus of mandates and penalties that has employers considering the option of dumping health care and paying more in salaries instead. The mandate to keep “children” on plans until the age of 26 has employers seeing a steep cost curve. For Caterpillar alone, the 26-year-old mandate will cost over $20 million a year. Under those conditions, the penalties look pretty good. [link]

So what will it cost the government to provide subsidies for the millions of Americans who will now find themselves without company-provided health care? You guessed it: Billions!

Did Obama and the Democrats knowingly seek to destroy our health care system so that insurance companies (and Obama’s financial backers) would profit?

…some of us predicted that the numbers used by Democrats pushing ObamaCare bore little connection to reality — and that it would incentivize employers to destroy the net of employer-based health insurance. It looks like that day is fast approaching, and that’s no myth. It’s a reality that Henry Waxman tried hard to hide from the American public. [link]