Venango County Tea Party Patriots

A non-partisan, non-profit, non-member, association dedicated to educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market economics, and all other lawful activities.

small businesses

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Small Business Insurance Up in 2013

A new report finds that health-care insurance premiums for small businesses are up in 2013.

Two-thirds of small businesses report paying more for insurance premiums per employee this year than they did in 2012, according to a new study from the National Federation of Independent Business released Thursday.

The pro-business nonprofit group found in a survey of almost 1,000 small businesses that owners pay an average of $6,721 a month, or $80,652 a year, to provide health care insurance to their employees.

The report found that most employers are trying to shield workers from the cost increases.

Two-thirds of employees pay the same price for deductibles as they did last year, but 28 percent pay more, and only four percent pay less.

Owners are also covering higher insurance premiums, with 66 percent of small businesses cutting into profits to pay for cost increases, while 40 percent delayed, postponed or eliminated business investment to make room for health insurance. Nearly half of employers also sought to increase productivity to pay for the costs.

The authors of the study say the Obama administration’s flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act is part of the problem.

“The law’s authors were primarily focused on increasing insurance coverage and expanding benefits — they gave little or no consideration to concerns about cost or who would foot the bill,” said William J. Dennis, the author of the study and a senior fellow at the NFIB Research Foundation. “Ironically, had they instead made reducing costs a priority, this would have been a natural incentive for increasing coverage. Unfortunately though, this single-minded approach resulted in a law with a rising price tag, and Obamacare’s authors failed to consider that someone has to pay for all the bells and whistles included in the law. That ‘someone’ it turns out is often the small-business community — small employers, their employees and their families.”

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Small Businesses Will Cut Hiring

A quarter of small-business owners plan to cut hiring to stay under 50 employees so they can avoid one of Obama-Care’s many onerous mandates. In other words, small businesses will be staying small.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which routinely appraises the small-business environment,found in its most recent quarterly survey of 1,300 executives that “the health care law has emerged as the top concern for small businesses.”

Nearly three-fourths (71%) told the Chamber that “the health care law makes it harder to hire.” And “only 30% say they’re prepared for the requirements of the law, including participation in the marketplaces, and one-quarter say they are unaware of what is required.”

Among small businesses that will be impacted by the employer mandate, half say they’ll either cut hours to reduce full-time employees or replace full-time employees with part-timers to avoid the mandate.

Meanwhile, almost a quarter (24%) say they’ll reduce hiring to stay under 50 employees.

Fifty is a key number. Under ObamaCare rules, any business with 50 or more full-time-equivalent workers has to provide them with health insurance coverage.

Noncompliance results in fines of $2,000 per employee, jumping to $3,000 for each employee who receives a health insurance tax credit and buys a plan through the federal insurance exchanges.

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30% of Small Business Owners Fear Closing in 2013

The latest Gallup Poll indicates that many American small-business owners are anything but optimistic when it comes to the way the Obama administration is leading the nation. In fact, they’re downright fearful.

According to the recently released Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index, when small-business owners in the United States were asked why they weren’t hiring new employees, a striking 61 percent said that it is because they are “worried about the potential cost of healthcare.” This analysis indicates that a good majority of Americans are not sold on ObamaCare and fear the toll that it will take not only on businesses, but on the economy as a whole — as it is implemented across the nation.

Another dismal outlook for 2013 came from a different response business owners gave when asked about reasons behind their hiring freeze.

“At the bottom of the list, but still at a surprisingly high level, 30 percent of owners say they are not hiring because they are worried they may no longer be in business in 12 months,” Gallup reports. “This is up from 24 percent who had the same worry in January 2012.”

When asked the same question about why they haven’t hired, an exceedingly high 66 percent of the 601 small business owners interviewed by Gallup expressed that they were “worried about the current state of the U.S. economy.”

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