Penna Dexter

The Trump Administration has just made it easier for small businesses to offer health insurance to their employees.

ObamaCare didn’t change the health insurance picture much for large companies. But it imposes rules and mandates on small businesses that have raised their costs and caused more and more of them to decide not to offer health insurance to employees at all.

The Department of Labor has finalized a rule that will enable more employers to form Association Health Plans — AHPs. Implementation began last week.  Alex Acosta, US Secretary of Labor describes how these health plans work in a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “A Health Fix for Mom and Pop Shops“. He writes, “Small businesses, including self-employed workers, may band together by geography or industry to obtain health-care coverage as if they were a single large employer.” “This new scale and access,” he writes, “means AHPs can offer more options at a better price.”

These AHPs will enjoy the economies of scale and larger risk pools that large companies benefit from. And, like large companies, they will escape requirements to provide many comprehensive benefits mandated under ObamaCare.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in the next few years, around four million Americans will enroll in AHPs and of those, 400,000 will be folks who are currently uninsured.

The plans will still be subject to ObamaCare’s rules requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions and its bans on lifetime limits.

Congress still could — and should — repeal the Affordable Care Act. ObamaCare is also being challenged again in court. The individual mandate to purchase health insurance, with its penalty which the Supreme Court earlier ruled was a tax, was done away with in the 2017 tax cut bill. So twenty states are suing again to strike down ObamaCare.

Meanwhile — this new rule chips away at ObamaCare. Secretary Acosta says, “President Trump will take action to provide whatever relief is within executive authority.”  The relief is welcome.