Over on the National Journal I talk grandfathering:

If you are a business, especially a small business already struggling to keep up with the costs of providing health insurance to employees, you want to keep the plan you have – you want it to be grandfathered. Grandfathered plans are exempt from some expensive new mandates in the PPACA...At first glance, employees and consumers might want their plans to be subject to these new rules… but when they see the price tag associated with this, many will balk. There is no free lunch. And under PPACA, the choice is simple – if an employer’s plan loses grandfathered status, either they purchase a more expensive plan, or they stop providing coverage.

So how do you lose grandfathered status? Marilyn summed it up nicely. Basically a plan can only make very limited changes to coverage, is heavily restricted in terms of increasing cost-sharing, and if fully-insured, a plan may not change carriers. This will make it very hard to keep the plan as is.

Proponents will say nonsense like this: “You can keep your plan, it will just have new consumer protections!” or “This is a fair rule that gives lots of flexibility to plans!” Some even say these rules will lower costs. But the cold, hard truth is simple. If your plan’s new “consumer protections” make it more expensive, you, and your employer, will have even more trouble affording it. If you want to buy a plan with more coverage, you should be free to do that, but this is the government forcing employers either to buy a more expensive plan, or to have no plan.

Read the entire post and these two from the NFIB and NCPA.