Since last week’s announcement that Obamacare’s employer mandate will be delayed until 2015, some small-business advocates are pushing to drop the mandate—or at least rewrite it.
The mandate requires businesses with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees to provide coverage to employees or pay a fine, which could reach $2,000 or more per year per employee. But some business advocacy groups now say the mandate places undue burden on small-business owners and should be changed.
The National Retail Federation, for example, wants the threshold of employees who must be covered by insurance to increase from those who work 30 hours per week to 40 hours. The group’s argument: Businesses will try to skirt the mandate by keeping worker hours under 30, and that punishes part-time employees who want more hours. “We’ve argued that the 40-hour workweek is where most people think the full-time work level should be,” Neil Trautwein, NRF’s employee benefits policy counsel, told The New York Times.
Other groups are using the delay to push for full repeal of the mandate. The National Federation of Independent Business has opposed federal health-care reform from its beginning and was behind the famous lawsuit overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. “This is simply the latest evidence that implementation of this terrible law is going to be difficult if not impossible, and the burden is going to fall on the people who create American jobs,” Andrew Markowski, NFIB’s state director for Connecticut, told the New Britain Herald.
Some health policy experts have pointed out that the employer mandate isn’t a necessarily a key component of health-care reform, anyway. For one thing, 94 percent of businesses with 50 to 199 employees already provide employee health coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Moreover, the individual mandate is still intact and will require every American to have insurance starting on January 1, 2014—whether they get that insurance through an employer or the public exchanges. Many policy experts also believe that health insurance shouldn't be tied to employment, partly because it deters workers from changing jobs or becoming entrepreneurs and penalizes people who can't find work.
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