GOP: Healthcare law 'encourages' business to cut back benefits

President Obama’s healthcare law gives the country’s biggest businesses a strong incentive to quit offering healthcare benefits, House Republicans said Tuesday.

Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee said employers would save billions of dollars if they quit offering health coverage to their employees and instead pushed workers into newly created insurance exchanges.

Ways and Means staff analyzed healthcare costs at 71 of the Fortune 100 companies. Those firms would save a collective $28.6 billion in 2014 by dropping their health coverage, according to the committee’s report. Over the next decade, they'd save about $6 billion each. Such a move would affect more than 10 million employees and dependents.