To many conservatives, the Affordable Care Act -- which they derisively call Obamacare -- is evil because, among other things, it means that the government is becoming too powerful. "Socialism," they argue, will destroy the United States although many nations are doing much better than we are in longevity and quality of life with health-care systems that have far more government involvement.
To many liberals, the Affordable Care Act should be defended at all costs regardless of its obvious flaws because the law was pushed through by a Democratic president and Congress over the opposition of Republicans. The fact that the law embraces principles they abhor and has a Byzantine design that turns millions of Americans off seems to be less relevant to them than rooting for their team.
I have tried to be objective about the Affordable Care Act and have done considerable research on it. Below is a report that I wrote that attempts to analyze the impact of the law on small businesses objectively. I’m sure that conservatives and liberals will allege that I failed.
Obamacare’s Pros And Cons For Small Businesses
When President Barack Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act in 2009, Obama’s political allies and opponents argued over the proposed bill’s impact on small businesses.
Obama’s political allies argued that the bill’s Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) health insurance exchanges would be beneficial to small businesses because it would:
* Allow them to share their health insurance costs with other small businesses.
* Help more of them offer health insurance to employees.
* Make them more competitive with large businesses that generally offered better health insurance plans to their employees.
Obama’s political opponents argued, though, that the bill would spur health insurance companies to raise their premiums on small businesses and its financial penalties on small businesses with at least 50 full-time employees that didn’t offer their employees insurance would:
* Make small businesses less apt to succeed.
* Provide small businesses an incentive for reducing their number of full-time employees.
Polls of small business owners show that they side with Obama’s political opponents. About 69 percent of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council’s members said the law won’t reduce their health insurance costs, 78 percent of small business owners told Forbes magazine’s pollsters that they want the law repealed, and 93 percent of them want to keep their old health insurance plan.
"For small business owners -- and most other Americans -- Obamacare is the devil we don’t want to know," wrote Forbes writer Jim Blasingame.
The Small Business Majority, though, favors the law because it believes it will spur many employees of large companies to start small businesses and buy insurance through the SHOP exchanges instead of continuing to work for their current employers just so they can have health insurance.
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reported that 98 percent of companies with more than 200 employees offer health insurance, but only 73 percent of companies with 10 to 24 employees and only 50 percent of companies with three to nine employees do.
"In the U.S., we pride ourselves on our entrepreneurial spirit, but we’ve had this bizarre disincentive in the system that’s kept people from starting new businesses," Small Business Majority CEO John Arensmeyer told The New Yorker magazine.
The big question about how the law will affect small businesses is "how much will insurance cost?"
Supporters of the Affordable Care Act point out that the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will reduce small business premiums by up to 4 percent.
Opponents, though, report that their premiums have increased since the Affordable Care Act became a law and argue that these increases are "in anticipation of expensive Obamacare mandates, like guaranteed insurability," reports Forbes magazine.
Being objective on this issue is very difficult, but the Kaiser foundation tried in its "How will the Affordable Care Act affect Small Businesses and their Employees?" report.
The report projected that about 3.7 million small business employees will be covered by SHOP by 2017 and detailed how small businesses can reduce their health insurance costs via tax credits and how much they will have to pay the U.S. government in fines if they don’t offer health insurance to their employees by 2015.
I urge everyone who is interested in the pros and cons of the Affordable Care Act to read the Kaiser report.
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