Small Businesses are about to get hit by a freight train

That depends. For a single person, that threshold is around $45,000. For a married couple, it's around $60,000. For a family of 4, it's $90,000 or so. The median household income in the US is around $50,000. Of course, the subsidies also diminish as you get closer to that mark, so it would be a smaller subsidy at that point.

Here's a good article on how Romneycare has actually played out. It has basically all the same principles, except smaller penalties for employers and a lower threshold for # of employees (11 vs 50) for small businesses to start coverage:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/100723888

Summary:

* Businesses haven't dropped insurance coverage
* Costs have definitely gone up (partly due to better coverage, partly not)
* Hasn't had a noticable effect on hiring in general or at the threshold level
* Hasn't overwhelmed doctors or hospitals or the medical system in general
* Majority approval in the state (though it's a clearly liberal state)
* People didn't seem interested in the exchange, which thus got scrapped (this seems odd to me)

Of course, some of this could also be influenced by economic conditions, and MA is a wealthier/healthier area in general, so it's not a perfect read on the situation - but it at least gives us a glimpse into what was feared there and what actually happened.

 

It's interesting, but I wonder what will happen when it goes into effect for the entire country. That which seems to work in a locality may not function as well when applied to the entire country.

I also would like to see the data used to derive the opinion that it has not had a noticeable effect on hiring. You would first have to know what hiring would have been without the mandate. That would be difficult to assess.

 

I agree - I don't know the details of the study. My guess would be that they looked at hiring patterns in MA vs other similar regions prior to the law and then after the law to see if there was divergence, but I really have no idea.

 

I think a more reasonable person would say remake your budget to provide enough money for catastrophic insurance at a minimum. As you point out, small companies with blue collar employees rarely provide it.