Obamacare’s Impact on Small Business Wages and Employment

“The ACA imposes several burdensome regulations that could potentially harm job and wage growth, including the employer mandate and requirements on the generosity of coverage. Under the ACA, employers with 50 or more full-time employees are required to provide health insurance for their workers or pay a fine. In addition, the ACA enforces rules that govern the type of insurance plans they can provide and restricts their options in choosing low-cost coverage. When employers are required to provide health insurance and their low-cost options are limited, costs will naturally rise and companies will be more responsive to changes in insurance premiums. As a result, employees are less insulated from insurance premium growth, and if premiums rise considerably under the ACA, then employers could be more likely to offset those costs by cutting jobs or wages.
Today, the central difficulty in analyzing the labor market implications of ACA regulations is that most significant rules have only been recently implemented. For instance, the employer mandate was scheduled for January 1, 2014, but the White House delayed the mandate to January 1, 2015, and then delayed it again to January 1, 2016 for businesses with 50 to 99 employees.”