While many small businesses may already be providing employee benefits for their workers, more than half of them are less than confident in how these plans will be affected by the time the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is put in place.
According to a recent poll conducted by Gallup, more than half of small business owners – 52 percent – say that the quality of healthcare will deteriorate as a result of the ACA, especially as it relates to the coverage their employees receive. Only 13 percent of respondents indicate that they believe healthcare will improve.
A similarly large amount of entrepreneurs who own a small business believe that the ACA will wind up costing them more money. Gallup reports that 55 percent of business owners projected that they will have to raise more money in order to pay for their employees' healthcare, with a mere 5 percent indicating that the reform law will enable them to devote less of the company's earnings toward coverage.
Additionally, the poll found that even though the ACA doesn't go into full effect until January of next year, business owners are already acting as though it's in place. In response to the ACA being signed into law, 41 percent said they have held off on hiring new employees, 38 percent said they have not expanded their business as they initially intended to and one in every four said they have floated the possibility of no longer providing employee benefits for their workers.
Supporters of the healthcare reform law have indicated that it will provide more people with health coverage. A recent report may corroborate this notion. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the seven years that Massachusetts adopted its universal healthcare law – a plan that many people say is similar to the ACA – employer-sponsored insurance coverage rose by 1 percent, while falling by 6 percent in the rest of the country.
