Obamacare Question: Ditch Employer Mandate?

A left-leaning think tank whose research is often taken seriously by backers of the health-care overhaul has published a paper suggesting the administration should scrap the health law’s requirement that employers offer coverage or pay a penalty.

“Why Don’t We Just Get Rid of the Employer Mandate?”, by three researchers at the Urban Institute, argues that the requirement won’t lead to many more people gaining coverage, since most firms that don’t currently offer benefits to all their workers will opt for the penalty, and most firms that already voluntarily offer benefits will want to carry on doing so.

The researchers say that the penalty isn’t necessary to stop employers from dumping their workers now that they can get coverage other ways. They reason that workers will still consider employer insurance attractive, and so employers will conclude that it’s worth providing because tax breaks on employee benefits offset some of the cost of providing them.

Read the full story here: http://on.wsj.com/1nEQHRe

Source: The Wall Street Journal