The Obamacare Myth About Small Business

[cbdo2007]

The Obamacare myth about small business

By Jose Pagliery @Jose_Pagliery
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

It's been uttered by every opponent of health care reform: Obamacare will kill small businesses.

But the new law's rules don't apply to the vast majority of small businesses. The employer mandate, which forces firms to start providing insurance in 2014, pertains only to companies with at least 50 full-time workers.

That's a tiny fraction of small businesses.

As of 2010, there were roughly 5.7 million small employers, defined as those with fewer than 500 workers. Some 97% of them have fewer than 50 employees. That means Obamacare's employer mandate applies only to 3% of America's small businesses.

That's about 200,000 companies.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/21/smallbusiness/obamacare/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

[Pelican]

1. That is a terrible way to argue a point...

The way it comes off is...

Yeah, it's gonna be bad but only for 3%... That's only 200,000 businesses!

[cbdo2007]

2. You didn't click through did you....

That's ok, we can wait. I'll be here all day.

[still_one]

4. Instead of telling what the complete article says you argue to read the complete

Article.

The critique has a point, if you try to argue a position that is not a good way to approach it in my view

It is similar to how they have been selling the ACA, you want to understand it go to this link or that link instead of outlining exactly the positive points

[cbdo2007]

5. Due to copywrite laws we are limited to how much we can post here....

sorry to make you do all this extra work. I thought the article as a whole does a good job refuting the specific complaints from certain repubes and actually showing us the numbers.

[still_one]

9. I understand

[Drale]

3. Question about the Employer mandate

is this going to force companies, like Target, that don't offer insurance to part time workers (some of who are not part time by choice) to offer it?

[cbdo2007]

6. I think they have to offer it if you work 30+ hours.

If you are 29 hours and below I don't think they have to offer it.

[Drale]

7. Hmmm thats what they do now

it sucks because my girlfriend doesn't have insurance, she's working on getting the Indiana insurance for the poor but its taking a while and she has nerve damage and 2 herniated disks in her back and is in constant pain.

[cbdo2007]

8. Sorry about your girlfriend and her situation....

I think it used to be 32 hours and more they had to offer it, now the Affordable Care Act lowered it to 30 hours+. Unfortunately she may need to wait until 1/1/2014 to get coverage through the insurance exchanges in your state. They shoudl be coming online on 10/1/2013 so you should be able to at least get some good information at that time. Good luck!

[alc]

10. and very few of those small businesses will become medium or big business

But this is another disincentive to grown. I've worked for a couple of companies as they neared the 50 employee mark. One of the companies stayed under 50 even though there was more business - the owner was happy with $millions and just wanted to run the business not deal with the more government.

The other wanted to be much bigger but we didn't hire the 50th employee until we could hire a full time HR person and pay bigger legal retainers and the CPA more involved in the business (I was one of the first 10 and in on all the decision making around the 50th employee). There was about 6 months of everyone being overworked until we hired 6 people at once. This was 10 years ago and I'm pretty sure that in the same situation today the owner would decide to grow with contractors, temps, part-time workers, offshore workers and other means to stay under 50 for much longer. They grew to over 200 employees while I was there and 500 before they sold to a European company.

It's not just the number of businesses that are affected, but also which are affected and what decisions they make. It could actually encourage "small business" but not necessarily in the way Americans want.