Businesses Prepare For Another Health Care Delay

A health care policy analyst at Indiana University says the overall impact of another delay in the employer penalty aspect of the Affordable Care Act is very small. Center for Health Care Policy and Professionalism Research Director Aaron Carroll says if the federal government removed the penalty altogether, it would “barely shift the needle” in the amount of uninsured people. He says the delay, announced last week, means increased costs for the federal government, but other parts of the law have come in below projections. Carroll discussed the employer mandate delay with Barb Lewis in the Business of Health. Carroll says politics could be playing a small role in repeated ACA delays, but he most of the problem is it has been very difficult to launch such a wide-ranging law.

He adds many economists do not like the employer penalty. They feel it pushes some people into part-time work and has several other aspects that are bad for business.

Under the current guidelines, medium businesses, those with 50-99 employees, now have until 2016 to provide health insurance to employees. The deadline for large businesses is 2015.

Small businesses does not have an employer penalty, but workers still have to obtain coverage from the health care exchange by this fall.Source: Inside INdiana Business