Business Savior – Self Insurance & Shifting Sick Workers To Exchanges

savior

With health care costs skyrocketing, many business owners are now investigating whether it would be beneficial to pay chronically ill workers to leave the company health plan and purchase insurance through the exchanges created by Obamacare. The key is the self-insurance marketplace……………..As the American public has begun to discover, the Affordable Care Act contains various exemptions, surprises, and omissions, and one of its major dispensations is for companies that “self-insure,” meaning they give employees a stipend to purchase their own insurance rather than purchase insurance for those employees.”

See previous postings: Employers Consider Shifting Sickest Workers To Exchanges Through Loophole and ObamaRe Debuts In 2014 – The Ultimate Stop Loss Insurance Policy

   – January 07, 2014

The Affordable Care Act’s complex nature has forced a great number of American companies to carefully consider the affordability of insurance. In its quest to make health care accessible and reform the health care system, the Affordable Care Act made it so insurers could deny no individual coverage, regardless of his or her health history. For many businesses, that clause meant an opportunity to mitigate the rising cost of providing employees coverage.

As written, the Affordable Care Act requires any company with more than 50 full-time workers to provide those employees with “affordable” health care. Business with fewer full-time workers do not have to comply with the employer mandate, but they may participate in the small business health options program, in which employers of 50 or fewer workers can purchase employee insurance if they choose.

Before the health care reform law was implemented, many businesses already offered employer sponsored coverage. Among those firms with 50 or more employees, nearly 95 percent provided health insurance, while businesses with 50 or fewer employers currently provide health insurance to approximately 17 million Americans. While those numbers indicate employer-sponsored health insurance coverage will remain static as the implementation of Obamacare progresses, it  increasingly seems as though that will not be the case.