Dispelling several myths about the employers mandate of ACA but recognizing its problems: - The mandate, as written, affects relatively few employers. “You’ve got 5.7 million firms in the U.S.,” says Wharton’s Mark Duggan, who served as the top health economist at White House’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. “Only 210,000 have more than 50 employees. So 96 percent of firms aren’t affected. Then if you look among those firms with 50 or more employees, something on the order of 95 percent offer health insurance. So it’s basically 10,000 or so employers who have more than 50 employees and don’t offer coverage.” Those companies probably employ around one percent of American workers. - But that’s still a lot of employers, and a lot of workers, and so the health-care law has gotten a stream of bad press as one employer or another threatens to cut hours or fire workers in order to dodge the penalty. - It’s also proven difficult to enforce. Implementing the mandate requires a complex reporting process that’s left the administration flooded with comments from anxious employers — even those who offer insurance and have nothing to fear from the provision. > The big IRONY is that the worker-based employer mandate got passed in part because employers preferred it to a payroll-based mandate — a fact that puzzled Senate health aides at the time, but that they made peace with in order to pass the bill. > A PAYROLL-BASED mandate would have made much more sense than one based on number of employees > This CBPP article back from 2009 summarizes it best
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 15:26:23 +0000
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