I’ve spoken to probably one hundred larger employers that are worried about having to offer Health Insurance to their employees. Many of these larger employers are working on thin profit margins and cannot afford the Affordable Care Act. Kind of ironic huh?! I’ll let you in on a little secret that usually stops larger employers from all of the hand wringing…..you only have to “offer” it, most employees don’t want it.
Health Insurance for larger employers are not making them go bankrupt
Many larger employers that are worried about having to supply their workforce with Health Insurance benefits are seeing that most of their workers, especially the lower wage earning ones, are not finding the employer based Health Insurance affordable for them. They are actually caught in a kind of quandary. If their employer offers the Health Insurance and it meets the ObamaCare standards, the employees are not eligible for any subsidies on Covered CA. Many of the employees that thought they were eligible for the subsidy, found themselves owing the State of CA big bucks.
So much for the affordable part of the Affordable Care Act
When the thousands of people realize that they were not eligible for the subsidy that they signed up for on Covered CA, they ended up owing a ton of money to the government. When the larger employers were notified that they had to offer Health Insurance to their people, and did so, they unwittingly pushed many of those employees out of the eligibility arena. Affordable Care Act….I think not. Under the mandate, employees cannot be made to pay more than 9.5% of their W-2 wages for the single employee coverage offered by the employer, that’s the affordable part. The other piece talks about the coverage having all of the essential coverage that is mandated by ObamaCare. To say people were disappointed, was an understatement.