The Affordable Care Act will reduce the number of people without health insurance by expanding eligibility for Medicaid and providing tax credits that make insurance more affordable for people buying coverage on their own through new health insurance Exchanges. The Congressional Budget Office projects that 32 million more people will have insurance by 2019. Find out who gets covered and how with this simple flowchart, created as part of the Visualizing Health Policy series with The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Many of the nation’s employers are still on the fence concerning the “Play or Pay” question in health care reform.
Some are leaning toward “Play” (offering employees medical coverage that meets the requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [PPACA]), while others are favoring “Pay” (forking over penalties for not offering acceptable coverage to employees).
The law actually calls for two possible penalties for large employers with 50 or more employees: one for not offering “minimum essential” coverage, and the other for offering coverage that isn’t “affordable” and/or doesn’t provide “minimum value.”
Employers expect health care costs to rise an average of 7 percent next year, forcing organizations to employ a variety of cost- control measures that largely focus on asking workers to pay more, according to a new survey by the National Business Group on Health.
In the past few years, the cost of health care for employees in the U.S. has gone up, while the number of small businesses offering health insurance has been on a slow decline, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known as "Obamacare," aims to reduce health-care premiums for both individuals and small businesses by increasing the number of healthy people with insurance.
Still, many parts of the law don't sit well with small-business owners, especially the employer mandate, a requirement that employers with 50 or more workers must offer health-insurance coverage or face fines ranging from $2,000 to $3,000 per employee per year.
For a breakdown of the health-care costs your business will face and insight on the future of healthcare for small-business owners and their employees.
What’s left to say during enrollment if you told your employees everything else about the Affordable Care Act over the summer?
Plenty! Enrollment shouldn’t be the first time employees hear about health care reform — if you plan for that, the media and advertisers will beat you to the punch.Let enrollment reinforce the messages from the summer, add more detail in key areas and focus on your benefit choices for 2014. You’ll still have plenty say:
