Obamacare's War on Women

"An unintended consequence of the abomination that is called ObamaCare is the dropping of wives from husbands' employer-provided health care insurance," write editors at Investor's Business Daily. "It is a de facto war on women."

Mandating coverage for children up to age 26 is costly, so savings have to be found elsewhere. One of the ways employers can save is by dropping spouses from health insurance offerings, and the spouses that get dropped tend to be women, according to health care experts.

That's if the employer continues the health insurance coverage at all:

Many employees will lose their coverage when employers figure out that it's more cost-effective for them to stop insuring their workers and just let them fall into the exchanges.

How many? More than a few. The business journal McKinsey Quarterly surveyed 1,300 employers and found that "Overall, 30% of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI (Employer Sponsored Insurance) in the years after 2014."

But it's likely that a larger portion will actually make that choice as companies learn more about ObamaCare.

"Among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50%, and upward of 60% will pursue some alternative to traditional ESI," the McKinsey Quarterly says.

Not all spouses will be jettisoned from employer coverage due to the dependent coverage mandate. Some companies will simply require their employees to pay a spousal surcharge rather than drop them from the insurance rolls. Expect those surcharges to be $500 to $1,000 a year, says Forbes.

Sure, the spouses will be able to keep their plans. But the higher-cost insurance will be a much worse deal than in the days before ObamaCare.