Help has finally arrived for small businesses and their employees. The rapidly rising cost of health insurance has made it extremely difficult for many small businesses to provide their employees with health insurance, and entirely precluded many others. In addition, because they lack the bargaining power and large risk pooling of larger employers, small businesses face higher premiums than larger employers.
Health reform, or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) should ease this problem for some small businesses. Firms that pay for at least half of their employees’ premiums and have 24 or fewer employees may qualify for a health insurance premium tax credit of up to 35 percent of the premium’s average cost.
An Iowa Fiscal Partnership policy brief details the small business health insurance premium tax credit. The table below illustrates potential credits based on number of employees and how much they are paid.
Families USA, a national consumer advocacy group, and Small Business Majority, released a report this week estimating that as many as 51,100 Iowa small businesses may be eligible for some portion of the tax credit, with as many as 14,000 of those eligible for the full 35 percent credit.
Though similar state-level incentive programs have had varying levels of success in inducing small businesses to provide insurance to their employees, the PPACA credits appear poised to make a real difference for small businesses.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City saw the tax credits as an opportunity. It began marketing the new tax credit to small businesses that were not providing insurance benefits to employees.
Its efforts had a tremendous payoff for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, to small businesses in that area, and to their employees. Sixty small businesses in the area that had previously not offered health insurance to employees signed up for BCBS’s small business health insurance plan. As a result of the tax credit and BCBS-KC’s marketing efforts, Small Group sales have increased 179 percent between April and June of this year, meaning 5,000 new customers for it, and 5,000 more Kansas Citians with health insurance.
Posted by Andrew Cannon, Research Associate
