The Heartland Institute featured CAHC’s Joel White in its latest edition that focused on the Trump administration’s pivot to directly giving consumers money to negotiate and buy their own insurance
Joel White at the Council for Affordable Health Coverage argues it is important to remove regulations that make it impossible for small businesses to offer health insurance to their workers. Small businesses are the biggest employers in the nation.
“These rules increase costs by 20-50 percent,” wrote White in a recent email thread among free-market reformers. “Partly as a result of these new mandates, small businesses dropped coverage. Currently, more than half of legitimate Obamacare enrollees (12 million) work at a small business, where taxpayers pay subsidies that are three times more than the tax exclusion.”
The tax exclusion is the tax break employers get on payroll taxes when they offer health insurance to their employees.
“These small business workers on Obamacare get higher deductibles (2x more) and worse access to doctors and drugs (80 percent of ACA plans are HMOs or EPOs),” wrote White.
Unlike large group employers, small businesses must offer health plans that provide all the expensive provisions of the Affordable Care Act, such as “essential health benefits,” and adhere to its expensive rating rules. When they can’t afford such plans, they cancel employer-provided insurance, writes White.
White’s organization has long pushed for the government to allow Association Health Plans and let small employers self-insure, two options that would give employers and workers much more choice in health care.