Small businesses have turned their backs on the Affordable Care Act, says healthcare expert Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization.
"They call it the shop exchange [and] the coverage that's offered through these shop exchanges is really substandard. It's very expensive," Turner said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"The government provides subsidies for small businesses to lure them into this coverage, but the subsidies themselves have a lot of very tricky thresholds."
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Turner said that for an average subsidy, the average wage of an employee has to be no more than $25,000 a year, and a small business can have no more than 25 employees to qualify for a full subsidy.
"So these very small businesses — hair dressers, garages — have to go through a lot of bureaucracy in order to qualify for these meager federal subsidies," she said.
"They also have made it much more difficult than it needs to be for independent agents to help small businesses … The shop exchange software makes it difficult for businesses to access the people who are willing to help them navigate this bureaucracy."
What's more, the Affordable Care Act website remains "problematic" and "troubled," according to Turner.
"You think, why does the government need to do this? This is something that's not helping many businesses, the technology is very problematic," she said.
"There are people right now in the private sector who want to help small businesses. Give them a little boost, give them a little nudge. Instead, they've got the door slammed in their face."
She said the provisions in the Affordable Care Act tempt businesses to want to hire illegal immigrants.
"It's one of the many, many unintended consequences of this 2,800-page law, with something like 25,000 pages of regulation and counting — that illegal immigrants are not eligible for health insurance through the exchanges," Turner said.
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