The White House is still working towards the Affordable Care Act—but not without more delays. This next one-year delay will be for the employer mandate, which was already delayed last year. The delay affects small businesses with 50-99 employees.
Under the Obamacare plan, employers with 50 or more employees will be required to offer their full-time employee health insurance, or pay a penalty of $2000 per employee. But now, this penalty will now not go into effect for everyone until 2015.
Why is this important? For obvious reasons, small businesses around the country are distressed at the new burden this act will place on them: both options result in higher costs for small businesses (that do not already offer affordable health insurance to their employees). The mandate is necessary to place on businesses in order to discourage employers from dropping coverage. Doing so would leave employees to buy subsidized insurance and thus place too great a burden on taxpayers for the system to work.
However, this delay only affects employers in the 50-99 employee range. Businesses with 100+ employees must offer affordable/reasonable coverage to at least 70% of full-time workers in 2015 and 95% in 2016, or make an employer responsibility payment.
Although there is much disagreement regarding the fairness of this delay for families, hopefully this additional delay will give small businesses a bit more time to adjust to the effects and mandates of Obamacare. The Treasury strongly encourages employers to maintain or expand health coverage for their employees.
Original article from Business Insider.
