Did the creation of Obamacare cost businesses more money? (They suddenly had to pay for health insurance for employees or more employees?)
And will canceling Obamacare save businesses money?
i.e. Is it that “rich people” who own businesses only care about saving themselves money and could care less if their employees have health insurance or not?
Narcissism gone wild!
Only businesses with over 50 employees(full time) are required to offer health insurance.
Any premium increases were passed on to the employee. I’m going to say it cost most businesses roughly zero dollars to comply with the law. Except for insurance companies, but they got plenty of handouts from the deal too.
The big issue is that “full time” was defined as 30 hours for benefits purposes, meaning McDonald’s had to limit their most lucrative employees to 30 hours or less in order to stiff them on healthcare benefits, which they were doing at 39.5 hours a week before.
Disclaimer: I work in advertising, and my primary client is a major regional health insurance company.
Though, many smaller businesses do also offer health insurance to their employees, of course.
The conventional wisdom was that the ACA would lead many small businesses to drop their group coverage, since it would become (relatively) easy for their employees to buy their own coverage through the Marketplace, and that, in time, “small group” coverage as a segment in the industry would decline dramatically.
But, as things have developed, and as health insurance companies have scaled back their ACA offerings (or stopped offering those policies entirely), what I’ve seen is that there haven’t been nearly as many people moving from “small group” to individual policies as was originally predicted. There are now states (including where my client operates) in which someone who goes to buy an ACA policy has exactly one company to choose from.
Also…as group coverage rates go up, most employers are, indeed, increasing the “employee share” payment for that coverage, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re passing 100% of the rate increases through. Employees aren’t happy when what they have to pay for their health insurance goes up (sometimes by a lot), but a lot of them don’t realize just how much their employer’s share of their total health insurance premium is, and how their employers are paying more, too.