Why Small Businesses Aren’t Using the Health Insurance Tax Credit — The American Magazine

The White House estimates that only 360,000 of the 3.2 million companies thought to be eligible for the Small Business Health Care Tax Credit made use of it in fiscal 2011, according to a report released by the Small Business Majority and Families USA. Why are so few businesses making use of a credit designed to help them cope with the high cost of providing employee health insurance?

via Why Small Businesses Aren’t Using the Health Insurance Tax Credit — The American Magazine.

New Rulemaking Tracker Makes Obamacare Easier to Digest – PR.com

Enter Knowledge Mosaic Inc. The Seattle-based vendor of legal and federal regulatory information has created a new online tool, the Affordable Care Act Rulemaking Tracker (ACA Tracker). Patterned after their popular Dodd-Frank Rulemaking Tracker and part of their Knowledge Mosaic subscription service, the ACA Tracker allows government, attorneys, professionals at affected companies, lobbyists, journalists, healthcare administrators, and anyone else who may need to stay abreast of new and proposed rules resulting from the Act to make sense of what is going on.

“The ACA Tracker creates a suite of regulatory tracking tools that contribute enormously to our pathbreaking project to map the entire federal regulatory landscape,” said Knowledge Mosaic President Peter Schwartz.

via New Rulemaking Tracker Makes Obamacare Easier to Digest – PR.com.

CBO Confirms It: ObamaCare Creates an Unstable Disequilibrium in Insurance Subsidies | e21 – Economic Policies for the 21st Century

In March, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a new study on employee migration out of job-based plans and into ObamaCare’s state exchanges. The effect of ObamaCare on employer-based insurance has been a hotly debated topic ever since the law was enacted in March 2010. Several independent analysts predict that “dumping” into the exchanges will occur at a much higher rate than CBO assumed in its original estimates of ObamaCare and have argued that the result would be much higher federal costs than CBO estimated.

via CBO Confirms It: ObamaCare Creates an Unstable Disequilibrium in Insurance Subsidies | e21 – Economic Policies for the 21st Century.

CBO | CBO and JCT’s Estimates of the Effects of the Affordable Care Act on the Number of People Obtaining Employment-Based Health Insurance

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) continue to expect that the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—the health care legislation enacted in March 2010—will lead to a small reduction in the number of people receiving employment-based health insurance. Some observers have expressed surprise that CBO and JCT have not expected a much larger reduction given the expanded eligibility for Medicaid and the subsidies for insurance coverage purchased through health insurance “exchanges” that will result from the ACA. CBO and JCT’s estimates take account of those factors, but they also recognize that the legislation leaves in place some financial incentives and also creates new financial incentives for firms to offer and for many people to obtain health insurance coverage through their employers.

Despite the care and effort that CBO and JCT have devoted to modeling the health insurance system and the provisions of the ACA, there is clearly a tremendous amount of uncertainty about how employers and employees will respond to the set of opportunities and incentives under that legislation. In response to questions from Members of Congress, CBO and JCT have prepared an analysis showing how the effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage would differ under alternative assumptions about the behavior of employers.

via CBO | CBO and JCT’s Estimates of the Effects of the Affordable Care Act on the Number of People Obtaining Employment-Based Health Insurance.

Trends in Health Coverage for Part-Time Workers by Paul Fronstin :: SSRN

This paper reviews recent trends in coverage for workers by part-time status and firm size. It examines data from the Census Bureau’s most recent Current Population Survey, and is designed to provide a base line for measuring future trends once the 2014 health coverage mandate in PPACA takes effect. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) enacted March 23, 2010, requires that employers with 50 or more full-time workers failing to provide health coverage to full-time workers in 2014 will be required to pay a penalty. Most of these employers already offer coverage: In 2011, 93 percent of employers with 50-199 workers offered coverage and 99 percent of employers with 200 or more workers offered it. However, not all employers offer coverage to part-time workers: In 2011, 15 percent of employers with 3-199 workers offered coverage to part-time workers, and 42 percent of employers with 200 or more workers offered it to part-time workers. Since 1999, there has been no clear trend away from offering coverage to part-time workers either among small or large employers, but between 2009 and 2011 small employers offering health coverage to part-time workers declined from 30 percent to 15 percent. While many employers already offer health coverage, there are other provisions of the PPACA that are expected to increase the cost of coverage. As a result, there is concern that employers may respond by cutting back on health coverage for part-time workers or by increasing the proportion of part-time workers employed, the latter of which has already been seen recently. The recent recession has already resulted in an increased use of part-time workers, fewer employers are offering health coverage to part-time workers, and there has been a slight drop in the percentage of part-time workers with coverage from their own employer. While employers with under 50 workers are not subject to the penalty if they do not provide health coverage, they may also drop coverage for part-time workers as a way to compensate for any cost increases.

via Trends in Health Coverage for Part-Time Workers by Paul Fronstin :: SSRN.

Mandate-Based Health Reform and the Labor Market: Evidence from the Massachusetts Reform by Jonathan Kolstad, Amanda Kowalski :: SSRN

We model the labor market impact of the three key provisions of the recent Massachusetts and national “mandate-based” health reforms: individual and employer mandates and expansions in publicly-subsidized coverage. Using our model, we characterize the compensating differential for employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI) — the causal change in wages associated with gaining ESHI. We also characterize the welfare impact of the labor market distortion induced by health reform. We show that the welfare impact depends on a small number of “sufficient statistics” that can be recovered from labor market outcomes. Relying on the reform implemented in Massachusetts in 2006, we estimate the empirical analog of our model. We find that jobs with ESHI pay wages that are lower by an average of $6,058 annually, indicating that the compensating differential for ESHI is only slightly smaller in magnitude than the average cost of ESHI to employers. Because the newly-insured in Massachusetts valued ESHI, they were willing to accept lower wages, and the deadweight loss of mandate-based health reform was less than 5% of what it would have been if the government had instead provided health insurance by levying a tax on wages.

via Mandate-Based Health Reform and the Labor Market: Evidence from the Massachusetts Reform by Jonathan Kolstad, Amanda Kowalski :: SSRN.

ISSA: Job creators brace for Obamacare impact – Washington Times

This week, the Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued a report, “Impact of President Obama’s Health Care Law on Jobs,” detailing the negative impact that President Obama’s health care law has already had and will continue to have on job creation. The report highlights congressional testimony from many businesses about the health care law’s negative impact on their company and their ability to hire.

via ISSA: Job creators brace for Obamacare impact – Washington Times.

Americans for Tax Reform : The Four Small Business Tax Hikes in Obamacare

There are four small business tax hikes in the jobs-killing Obamacare law. Each of them will kill jobs.

via Americans for Tax Reform : The Four Small Business Tax Hikes in Obamacare.

CBO: Health law could cause as many as 20M to lose coverage – The Hill’s Healthwatch

As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of President Obama’s healthcare reform law, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said in a new report Thursday.

The figure represents the worst-case scenario, CBO says, and the law could just as well increase the number of people with employer-based coverage by 3 million in 2019. 

via CBO: Health law could cause as many as 20M to lose coverage – The Hill's Healthwatch.

Corporate Health Care Exchange Survey | Aon

Nearly all employers (94%) are committed to offering and financially supporting health benefit coverage for their workforce in the foreseeable future.

The commitment is there but what about the solution? The average cost of health coverage per employee crossed the $10,000 mark for the first time in 2012*. The cost of health care is projected to increase at an average rate of 7% to 10% in 2012. Meanwhile, salaries are expected to increase about 3% on average. This tenuous dynamic, coupled with the fact that many employees are becoming more educated and better stewards of their own health care choices, makes now the ideal time to explore other health care coverage options, including Exchanges.

To better understand employer views on Health Care Exchanges, Aon Hewitt surveyed 562 organizations nationwide.

via Corporate Health Care Exchange Survey | Aon.