If business owners were successfully able to assemble their employee benefits program so that it's in lockstep with the mandates as dictated by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), millions of hours in work productivity would be lost, according to a new estimate.
A joint report was recently released by the House Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and the Workforce Committees, which claims to have counted up the number of hours employers would have to devote in order to fully comply to the ACA. Based on the committees' assessment, it would take 190 million hours in order to be in compliance with all the rules and regulations of the reform bill.
In that amount of time structures similar to the size of the Empire State Building could be constructed 27 times over, according to the committees. In addition, Halley's comet could be spotted 285 times, even though it can only be seen from Earth every 75 years or so.
"Every hour and dollar spent complying with the … healthcare law are time and resources being taken from spending time with family, growing a business and creating jobs, or caring for patients," the joint committees stated.
There's no shortage of compliance-related factors that business owner will need to be on top of before the ACA goes into effect in January of next year. For example, among employer-sponsored plans, business owners will need to establish a $2,000 maximum annual deductible for any single worker they have or a $4,000 maximum deductible per year for other plans, such as those that cover an entire family. However, there may be conditions in which the limits can be increased.
Business owners can investigate this further by visiting healthcare.gov.
