Small businesses continue to gauge health law implications

Some small business owners remain wary of a health law they do not yet clearly understand, The Kansas City Star reports. "Employers with 50 or more employees know this: The new law has employee coverage mandates looming for them in 2014. Employers with fewer than 50 employees will escape the coverage mandate. But they're not resting easy." Business expect costs to increase by between 6 and 40 percent in 2011, and many wonder whether they will be able to continue to afford subsidizing their employees' insurance coverage (Stafford, 9/6).

Meanwhile, though, "[m]ore than 16 million people are employed by small businesses that will be eligible for tax credits designed to offset health insurance premium costs starting next year, a new report finds," reports Business News Daily on last week's report by the Commonwealth Fund. It concluded "that most of the erosion in employer health coverage in the past 10 years has occurred in small firms. Just 46 percent of businesses with fewer than 10 employees offer health benefits compared with companies with at least 200 employees (98 percent) and firms with at least 50 employees (52 percent)" (Hernandez, 9/7).