Tim Armstrong just keeps doin' the thing

Obamacare has driven up AOL's benefit costs (as it is for every business -- small or big -- that administers a plan).

Whether you self insure or buy insurance traditionally, you have been getting hammered on premium increases (and it will be even worse next year, when premiums are final).

So when he started off with his riff about passing along $7.1 million in added Obamacare costs to employees, I'd imagine it was a pretty exact number -- even if he shouldn't have been going there at all, to that audience.

Obamacare has nothing to do with the women who had expensive births, though. If AOL self insures, it has the option to manage its risk of coverage costs exceeding its expectations. It can pay for stop-loss insurance.

If it did that, the company has no reason to think about how much in health care costs employees are running up. If it didn't (the only reason for him to be bringing it up), he rolled the dice and lost. When you take a calculated risk to try to save some money, you need to be prepared to live with the risk you took.

Doc, I disagree with the notion that $2 million is insignificant, or a rounding error kind of number. At least, I would if I owned shares in AOL. AOL earned about $92 million in net income last year. $2 million would about 2 percent of that.