“In short, small business owners will change from investing in their employees and their company to a strategy of avoiding growth that will require them to comply with the health care law. Support for the law is very low among small businesses surveyed (21%), and almost eight-out-of-ten (77%) of small businesses surveyed support its repeal.”
“Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman’s most famous book was titled ‘Free To Choose,’ a treatise on the centrality of choice to a free economy. PPACA militates against choice. The individual mandate is not just a constitutional issue, it is fundamentally an economic issue. The mandate explains why the law remains unpopular, and why politicians who passed it are not using it as the centerpiece of their campaign.”
“Logistically a company with only 30 full-time employees managing thousands of part-time employees sounds far-fetched. However, with this sort of perverse financial incentive, companies in many industries–-particularly those with low-skilled, low wage employees – will ‘do the math’ and hire part-time workers over full-time workers. While this may keep human resource departments busy, it will cause many businesses to miss out on some economies of scale, as they devote more time and effort to hiring and training part-time workers.”
“Most American employers believe that a Supreme Court decision rejecting the entire healthcare law would be the best option for their finances, a new poll finds. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed believe a ruling voiding the law would best bolster their bottom line.”
“Many small businesses struggle to afford health insurance for their workers, but a a new tax credit meant to help them seems to be turning into a disappointment. Although opinion polls show the credit is one of the most popular ideas in President Barack Obama’s health care law, only 170,300 businesses out of a pool of as many as 4 million potentially eligible claimed it in 2010, about 4 percent.”
“Tax credits in President Obama’s healthcare law aren’t big enough to prompt small businesses to start offering healthcare benefits, the Government Accountability Office said Monday. The small-business tax credit has not lived up to expectations. The Congressional Budget Office initially estimated that the credits would total $2 billion in 2010, but the real cost that year only came to $468 million, GAO said.”
“Consultants have told some large employers they can save money by dropping health insurance in 2014 and funneling employees into insurance exchanges under the new health-care law, according to a report by congressional Republicans.”
“Uncertainty over changes in national health care policy has emerged as an issue in supermarket labor contracts.
Union employees of Giant and Safeway stores in Washington and Baltimore last week agreed to a new contract with an unusual duration of 19 months, a period during which both sides hope to gain more visibility into the potential financial impacts of changes set to take place as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the sweeping changes in national health care policy approved two years ago.”
“In 2009, during the height of the debate over Obamacare, the law’s architect, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, was all over the op-ed pages, talking about how the bill would reduce the cost of health insurance… His words were trumpeted by the law’s advocates, and were critical to persuading skittish Democrats to vote for the bill. But it turns out that ‘for sure’ doesn’t mean what you thought it did. Because, now, Gruber is quietly telling state governments that the law will significantly increase the cost of insurance. And it will especially do so for young Americans: the ones who most struggle to find affordable health coverage.”
“Two years after Congress passed President Barack Obama’s health-care legislation, despite all the assertions about what it will or won’t do, no one really knows how it’s going to work. The U.S. has rarely attempted anything of this scale before. If the law survives the Supreme Court and Republican repeal efforts, its impact turns on what Paul Keckley, head of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, a unit of the accounting firm, calls ‘four big bets.'”