So is that a good idea — to encourage low-wage employers to spend the equivalent of the penalty (which could be adjusted up) — to subsidize the upfront costs of an exchange plan? You could also offer those employees a government-run program to counsel employees on the best plans for their needs. That could be financed by a very small surcharge on all premiums.
It could be that employers offering crappy insurance to low-wage workers is a worse problem than offering none at all. An employer offer of insurance deemed "affordable" by ACA standards disqualifies the employee from subsidies in the ACA marketplace, whereas a lot of low income workers can get decent coverage in the marketplace if they're not disqualified in that way.
One unknown at this point is the extent to which employers are taking up the Trump admin-initiated option to subsidize marketplace coverage for their employees and satisfy the employer mandate that way. HealthSherpa, the dominant commercial e-brokerage processing ACA marketplace enrollments (mostly through brokers) claimed last July that its processing of employer-sponsored enrollments was up tenfold, albeit from an unspecified and probably very low starting point. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220718005114/en/Alegeus-and-HealthSherpa-Experience-Significant-Momentum-for-ICHRA
So is that a good idea — to encourage low-wage employers to spend the equivalent of the penalty (which could be adjusted up) — to subsidize the upfront costs of an exchange plan? You could also offer those employees a government-run program to counsel employees on the best plans for their needs. That could be financed by a very small surcharge on all premiums.
It could be that employers offering crappy insurance to low-wage workers is a worse problem than offering none at all. An employer offer of insurance deemed "affordable" by ACA standards disqualifies the employee from subsidies in the ACA marketplace, whereas a lot of low income workers can get decent coverage in the marketplace if they're not disqualified in that way.
One unknown at this point is the extent to which employers are taking up the Trump admin-initiated option to subsidize marketplace coverage for their employees and satisfy the employer mandate that way. HealthSherpa, the dominant commercial e-brokerage processing ACA marketplace enrollments (mostly through brokers) claimed last July that its processing of employer-sponsored enrollments was up tenfold, albeit from an unspecified and probably very low starting point. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220718005114/en/Alegeus-and-HealthSherpa-Experience-Significant-Momentum-for-ICHRA