Obamacare Small Business Health Insurance Costs To Rise

For Obamacare health insurance, about two-thirds of small business will be hit with premium rate increases, the US government has admitted.

And those more expensive premiums under the Affordable Care Act will affect about 11 million workers of those small companies.

That was assessment of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that keeps track of such things. “We are estimating that 65 percent of the small firms are expected to experience increases in their premium rates while the remaining 35 percent are anticipated to have rate reductions,” the CMS report indicated.

Many employers conduct themselves in an arbitrary or unfair (or worse) way when it comes to pay and benefits, but these forced increased insurance premium costs will obviously affect businesses that operate in good faith, too. At least some portion of the costs will likely be passed along to workers and customers.

A Florida restaurant chain has already started passing along an ACA surcharge to customers right on the bill.

Said House Speaker John Boehner about the CMS findings, “The Obama administration has finally been forced to disclose what we’ve long feared — the president’s health care law means higher premiums for millions of American workers. For all the promises of lower costs for small businesses, the administration now admits that far more of these workers will pay higher than lower premiums under the law.”

Earlier this year, the prestigious Mayo Clinic, for example announced that Obamacare is prompting changes in healthcare for their own employees. ‘The average cost for a middle tier ‘select plan’ will increase by $180 a year for a single employee and by $576 for a family.”

According to Investor’s Business Daily, under the law small businesses can no longer shop for insurance that takes into consideration the demographics of their specific workforces. Against that backdrop, “The [CMS] report doesn’t say how big these hikes will be, but we have good reason to believe the extra costs will be significant … In 2009, Obama promised small businesses that his plan would ‘make the coverage that you’re currently providing more affordable.’ Later he said it would drive small-business premiums down by 4% in its first year, and as much as 25% by 2016.”

Although the employer mandate for big business has been postponed until 2015 (and delayed for mid-sized businesses until 2016), more companies may be tempted to offload even their full-time workers to government-run exchanges. Some have already done so, primarily with part-timers.

While disconnecting insurance from employment may be a good thing in the long run, that too comes at a cost to taxpayers in terms of those consumers who become eligible for a taxpayer-funded subsidy. Should Obamacare forced insurers into the red, calls for a massive bailout might be next.

With this mind, Natural News claims that “The authors of the law based part of its success on the fact that costs could be kept lower by forcing employers to shoulder the burden for covering employees. But what the authors didn’t anticipate was that the costs to provide said coverage are simply too much to bear for many companies, necessitating their need to dump as many employees as possible into the exchanges. And doing so will force a dramatic increase in the cost to the government (read: taxpayers) to cover additional millions whose coverage costs were supposed to be borne by employers.”

Separately, with the 2014 Congressional elections looming, there is buzz that the Obama administration will allow continued renewal of non-complaint health plans in the individual market. The reverberations of “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” are still being felt in the political arena. As a practical matter, however, many of these plans have already have been cancelled out or renewed with soaring premiums after incorporating the one-size-fits-all Obamacare coverage requirements.

[image credit: will1ill]

Watch some small business employees find out about Obamacare rate increases: