At the risk of understatement, The Federal Affordable Care Act of 2010 (or, depending on your politics, ObamaCare) has become a sort of a lightning rod issue.
One of the more controversial elements of the act is the assessment of taxes on businesses that choose not to offer their employees health insurance coverage. If your company employs more than 50 people on a full-time basis (at least 30 hours/week), you, dear reader, have a decision to make. You’ll need to do the math and then choose either:
- Begin (or continue) offering “comprehensive” health insurance coverage to each of your employees, or
- Don’t offer your employees insurance coverage and pay a $2,000 per employee penalty (after your first 30 employees).
Not to say your decision will be driven solely by arithmetic. There’s the competitiveness of your employee compensation package to consider. Will you be able to attract and retain top talent if you don’t offer a health plan? What about the composition of your workforce? Lots of temporary workers on your roster mean this may be a non-issue for you.
But most of us will be crunching numbers to determine how the cost of offering health coverage compares to the tax bill we’ll get if we don’t offer it.
But wait! The debate in Washington rages on about how much (if any) of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 will actually see the light of day. Hence, the head fake. Our federal government fakes left then moves right (pun intended), leaving us standing here with our, uh, business plan in our hands.
To be sure, there’ll be more head fakes, end-around, and flea-flickers before this all gets settled. But I, for one, am ready to see Congress take this political football right up the middle and score one for all the sick people who can’t find any humor in this issue.
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