Starting in 2016, push comes to shove for small businesses under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. As of January 1, small businesses, broadly defined as firms with 50 to 100 full-time employees, must comply with the ACA’s employer mandate and provide qualified health insurance to their workers or face stiff penalties. But this requirement poses a big threat to the financial stability of small employers—and not for the reasons you might think.
Obamacare includes a myriad of regulatory incentives and exemptions that define the parameters of the employer mandate. However, these have inadvertent consequences. Most important, exemptions in the ACA encourage small firms to self-finance their health care plans—that is, pay their workers’ health care bills directly, rather than covering them through a traditional insurance policy. Most large companies in America (above 3,000 employees) engage in self-funding, but that is done now by only about 16% of small companies of between 50 and 100 employees. According to my research, that number is set to rise. For the full article click here
from health IT caucus http://ift.tt/1WQp1xt
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment