Axing Obamacare's employer mandate would do little harm, study says
Last October, government-run Obamacare exchanges began selling private insurance plans to help people who don't have health coverage through their employers comply with the individual mandate.
However, last summer the federal government postponed by one year, until 2015, the mandate that all employers with 50 or more full-time employees offer those workers affordable health insurance plans. Full time, under Obamacare's rules, was defined as working 30 or more hours per week.
This past February, the mandate was delayed yet again, partially. Employers with fewer than 100 workers will not have to comply with the mandate until 2016.
Rules dictating the fines for the employers covered by the law are complex. But essentially, those employers who don't offer affordable health coverage to workers are subject to fines totaling $2,000 per worker, after the first 30 workers.
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The vast majority of large employers will not be subject to those fines, because they already offer health coverage to workers. In fact, a Kaiser Family Foundation study found that 98 percent of companies with more than 200 workers already offered such coverage. The Urban Institute noted that about two-thirds of all employers currently offer health insurance.
'Most employers would not drop coverage if the penalties were eliminated,' the Urban Institute's researchers wrote, noting the tax benefits companies gain by offering health insurance instead of higher pay. Salaries are subject to income and FICA taxes, while health insurance is nontaxable.
However, the research found that a total of about 500,000 workers would lose their employer-provided insurance if the mandate was eliminated, just 0.3 percent of the entire employer-insured workforce.
But the net increase in uninsured people nationally would be only about 200,000, because many of the workers who lost employer coverage would obtain insurance through either the Obamacare exchanges or through Medicaid, the Urban Institute found.
Holahan said that although he and the other researchers concluded that getting rid of the employer mandate 'would be a good thing to do ... it's going to be tough' to actually get Congress to officially scrap the rule.
He noted that Obamacare and its provisions have been a political hot potato, with Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly opposed to the law, and Democrats routinely rebuffing efforts to repeal or weaken it.
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