In early July, the Obama administration made the decision to delay an aspect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which mandated that businesses must provide health insurance to their employees, by one year. Now, it has pushed back another deadline and made a few other alterations to the rule once again.

Under the new changes, small business owners with fewer than 100 employees won’t have to provide such coverage until 2016, and larger companies will only have to provide health plans to at least 70 percent of their workers beginning in 2015, according to a joint report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service. Those larger industry participants that do not comply with these new regulations will face fines known as “employer shared responsibility payments” which are designed to offset the cost of allowing their workers to buy coverage through the ACA’s mandated exchanges with the help of federal tax credits.

“While about 96 percent of employers are not subject to the employer responsibility provision, for those employers that are, we will continue to make the compliance process simpler and easier to navigate,” said Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Mark Mazur. “Today’s final regulations phase in the standards to ensure that larger employers either offer quality, affordable coverage or make an employer responsibility payment starting in 2015 to help offset the cost to taxpayers of coverage or subsidies to their employees.”

How big of an impact will this have?
It should be noted that while 96 percent of companies nationwide – those with 50 employees or less, or already provide coverage to their workers – are not affected by these changes, the remaining 4 percent are divided more or less evenly between companies with 100 or more workers, or those with between 50 and 99, which do not extend such offers, the report said. In addition, any companies that rely upon volunteers will not have those people counted as full-time employees even if they put in the requisite number of hours.

Small business owners worried about these costs might want to think about the ways in which they can reduce internal expenses by finding more affordable small business insurance coverage. Reducing costs for commercial insurance, for example, can free up significant amounts of money over the course of the year, which in turn can be used to shore up any company’s financial standing.

In early July, the Obama administration made the decision to delay an aspect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which mandated that businesses must provide health insurance to their employees, by one year. Now, it has pushed back another deadline and made a few other alterations to the rule once again.

Under the new changes, small business owners with fewer than 100 employees won’t have to provide such coverage until 2016, and larger companies will only have to provide health plans to at least 70 percent of their workers beginning in 2015, according to a joint report from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service. Those larger industry participants that do not comply with these new regulations will face fines known as “employer shared responsibility payments” which are designed to offset the cost of allowing their workers to buy coverage through the ACA’s mandated exchanges with the help of federal tax credits.

“While about 96 percent of employers are not subject to the employer responsibility provision, for those employers that are, we will continue to make the compliance process simpler and easier to navigate,” said Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Mark Mazur. “Today’s final regulations phase in the standards to ensure that larger employers either offer quality, affordable coverage or make an employer responsibility payment starting in 2015 to help offset the cost to taxpayers of coverage or subsidies to their employees.”

How big of an impact will this have?
It should be noted that while 96 percent of companies nationwide – those with 50 employees or less, or already provide coverage to their workers – are not affected by these changes, the remaining 4 percent are divided more or less evenly between companies with 100 or more workers, or those with between 50 and 99, which do not extend such offers, the report said. In addition, any companies that rely upon volunteers will not have those people counted as full-time employees even if they put in the requisite number of hours.

Small business owners worried about these costs might want to think about the ways in which they can reduce internal expenses by finding more affordable small business insurance coverage. Reducing costs for commercial insurance, for example, can free up significant amounts of money over the course of the year, which in turn can be used to shore up any company’s financial standing.