Even though businesses now have an extra year to prepare for Obamacare, less than 1 in 3 small businesses in the U.S. are anywhere near ready for the law’s implementation, according to a new study conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber’s quarterly survey, released earlier this week, found that just 30 percent of small businesses feel they are actually prepared to meet the legal requirements mandated by the president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – a troubling fact considering the law was supposed to go into effect this fall.
“Excessive regulation is having a crippling effect on job growth among small businesses, as our latest small business survey makes clear,” Rob Engstrom, the Chamber’s senior vice president told The Hill.
In fact, half of the small businesses surveyed by the Chamber said they will be forced to either cut hours for their full-time employees or let them go completely because Obamacare considers any employee who works more than 30 hours a week to be a full-time worker.
One in 4 small businesses even admitted they would have to reduce the number of hires they make to stay under the 50-employee threshold that exempts them from key parts of the law. An additional 71 percent of small businesses reported that they believe the requirements imposed by Obamacare will make it more difficult to hire employees.
“Rising health insurance costs and taxes continue to be top concerns for small businesses,” National Federation of Independent Business’ Senior Vice President of Public Policy Susan Eckerly said in a statement. “Small employers need permanent remedies to the most harmful provisions in the law which are already impacting their businesses and their employees. The delays in Obamacare are further evidence that the law has problems and cannot be implemented in its current form.”
In a major setback for the president, the White House announced two weeks ago that it would delay the mandate for businesses to provide health insurances to employees for an extra year.
“We believe we need to give employers more time to comply with the new rules,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to the president, wrote in a blog post. “This allows employers the time to…make any necessary adaptations to their health benefits while staying the course toward making health coverage more affordable and accessible for their workers.”
The NFIB, the leading lobbying group for small businesses, doesn’t think the one-year delay is enough. Along with Congressional Republicans, the lobbyist group is asking for a delay on the individual mandate as well, saying that if employers do not have to offer insurance, the American people shouldn’t have to purchase it.
“Delaying implementation of the individual mandate alongside the employer mandate may provide members of Congress with time and opportunity to solve some of the law’s most grievous problems,” Eckerly said.
The Chamber’s Small Business Outlook Survey was conducted online between June 21 and July 8, 2013.
