Health Law Presents Options, Challenges For Colorado Small Businesses

Kaiser Health News ^ | April 29, 2014 | By Arthur Kane

[Oldeconomybuyer]

Jim Noon, owner of Denver cardboard box seller Centennial Container, has offered his employees health care coverage for three decades, but he isn't sure he will continue to offer the benefit after this year.

"I don't know what I'm going to do, but it's on the table to just let them all go to the exchange and get out of the health insurance business," he said. "It's one viable option, especially if it's going to be as complicated as it is now."

Late last year, Noon received an early renewal offer from his insurance company that will be good through the end of the year with an 8.6 percent premium increase. To get a policy compliant with Affordable Care Act requirements — one that covers birth control, which his current plan doesn't — would have cost Noon 50 percent more, according to documents Noon provided from his broker.

"I hate to be paying double the rates doing it as an employer if people can go to the exchange (as individuals) and pay less and qualify for subsidies," he said.

About half of small businesses in Colorado are seeing double-digit premium increases under the ACA while the other half are seeing the typical single-digit increases they have had for years.

[fwdude]

Wealth redistribution on steroids. That is all this abomination is.

[familyop]

Large numbers of people with fairly good incomes are being herded into Medicaid. Some of them are former local government officials, who were dropped because of the need to narrow support to their administrators’ insurance policies. One further consequence is that of new requirements in rural areas that nearly every kind of structure be engineered (barns, greenhouses, etc.), random property tax hikes, impact fee hikes and so on (more revenues and support for the political class during economic decline). The medical racket continues to get more expensive.