The Affordable Care Act – aka: ObamaCare – contained an "incentive" for Small Business Owners who did not provide health care insurance for their employees to add the benefit. Like much of the rest of the legislation that the Democrats just had to pass so we could find out what was in it, that provision appears to be yet another bust.
With their rose-colored glasses on the Obama Administration projected that 4 million small business owners would take the bait and start providing health care insurance benefits for their workers. The government run Small Business Administration's estimate was a tad more conservative suggesting that 2.6 million businesses would get in the game.
According to Internal Revenue Service records, however, a mere 170,300 small businesses signed up in all of 2010 according to Investor's Business Daily – just barely 4% of the White House's estimate.
The General Accounting Office auditors, GAO, reviewed the paltry performance and succinctly determined the incentive was far too small and the compliance regulations far too complex for the vast majority of small businesses to deal with. "Small-business owners generally do not want to spend the time or money to gather the necessary information to calculate the credit, given that the credit will likely be insubstantial," according to the GAO report.
Had anyone in the Administration actually had some private sector business experience, they likely would have figured that out in the first place.
As IBD summarized, "This is not the first time an ObamaCare program has failed to live up to predictions. The Department of Health and Human Services initially predicted that 375,000 would enroll in ObamaCare's insurance plan for those with pre-existing conditions. At present, about 61,600 have enrolled in the high-risk pools."
While the lack of participation in the incentive results in less cost for the subsidized incentive the end result will be more individuals eventually being dumped into the government approved plans – exactly what the real objective of ObamaCare was from the start…a total takeover of healthcare by the federal government. And, at that point the cost skyrockets and individual freedom to choose disappears.