Health Care thoughts: PPACA Employer Mandate Part 1

Health Care thoughts: PPACA Employer Mandate Part 1

So I am trying to put together a template for evaluating the employer health insurance mandate under PPACA….

Some preliminary thoughts:

50 employees does not mean 50 employees, there as a Full Time Equivalent (FTE) calculation that is certain to confuse employers because it is different than any other FTE calculation we have ever seen.

In the process of avoiding penalties employers need to obtain information about household income and number of persons in the household, but obtaining the information could be difficult and verifying the information could be impossible. Asking for the information before hiring could be illegal (opinions vary so far). Monitoring changes will be very difficult. And how will the government gather and update this information?

Smaller employers say 40 to 200 head count (or FTE) without sophisticated HR resources are going to be really confused.

This is gonna be interesting. Any thoughts from the Bears?

Rusty

From an e-mail from guest contributor Michael Halasy:

We don’t necessarily know either. My research (Operations Research with a Workforce focus) is modeling many of these changes (stochastic, variable, simulation, etc.). I think Tom’s point is correct in that this will get interesting. We need better modeling data to determine this. A good friend is a senior fellow at Lewin, and I know he is doing a lot of this modeling now (impact of ACA on companies, physician practices)…..I think it’s simply too early right now…