“It’s a good thing they delayed it,” said Doug Prestwood. “There’s just not enough information. It’s just a big chaos.”
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, dubbed “Obamacare”, was passed in 2010 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court a year ago. The administration announced Tuesday that employers have an extra year to provide workers health insurance.
“I don’t think this means that people are going to hire with reckless abandon now,” said David Lewis, chief executive of OperationsInc, a Connecticut-based human resources outsourcing and consulting firm that serves small to mid-sized companies. “It’s a can that’s just been kicked down the road.”
Administration officials have said the change affects less than 5 percent of businesses, as an overwhelming majority of employers already provide health coverage. But that could still involve as many as 10,000 businesses and hundreds of thousands of workers, according to reform advocates.
Many large employers already were on track to make the change to their benefits in time for the previous 2014 deadline, said Steve Wojcik, vice president of public policy at the National Business Group on Health in Washington, D.C.
“If you’re a large employer, your plans are well under way,” Wojcik said.
Many companies which offer healthcare benefits began planning changes in anticipation of the law months ago, because workers usually enroll in plans in the fall.
Companies that plan to hire said it was due to increased demand and not because the law was delayed.
“It will not change anything for us,” said Bob Mayer, vice president for human resources at Weis Builders, which is based in Minneapolis and has about 150 employees. “Our staffing plans are based completely on what we anticipate our growth in the marketplace to be, and not on a federal law that requires us to provide insurance.”