If small businesses are the economic engine that drives Ohio’s economy, companies have been stuck in neutral for months waiting for the details of the health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act to be developed.
And that’s causing a lot of hand-wringing for local business owners such as Jerry and Jill Henderson and Steve Gaswint, who took part in a health care tax forum sponsored by the National Federation of Independent Business on Wednesday.
The Hendersons have about a dozen employees at Hopewell Oil & Gas/Zane Petroleum who they treat like members of their family. They worry about what changes in health insurance they can expect beginning next week, with the exchanges set to be rolled out Tuesday.
“I just don’t know what we’re going to do,” Jerry Henderson said. “We want to help them – some have worked here for years -and we owe them that. But we really don’t know what the game plan is.”
That’s part of the problem, local insurance agent Tom “Rusty” Montgomery said.
“There are 2,700 pages in it (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), and no one in Congress has read it,” he said. “I sell a lot of insurance and not knowing what to tell people, it’s a real pain in the neck.”
Another insurance agent, Laurie Kelly, agreed.
“We’re supposed to be in front of clients a week from now, Oct. 1, and we don’t know what to tell them,” she said.
Roger Geiger, executive director of the NFIB in Ohio, said the uncertainty with how small businesses, and in turn their employees as individual consumers, will be affected by such taxes as the health insurance tax, or HIT, which is embedded in the federal health care overhaul, is causing the economy to lag.
The HIT is a tax on insurance companies based on the their net premiums written. The tax in turn will be passed along to small businesses and their employees in the form of higher premiums.
“This is a horrible piece of legislation, and this HIT is just one piece of it,” Geiger said. “This economy just cannot afford a $100 billion tax that will drain money from companies wanting to hire and drain money from people who the companies depend on to spend.”
He said companies have been making moves for several months now, laying off employees or not hiring because of not knowing how much the insurance changes will cost them.
Tim Thompson, co-owner of several Wendy’s restaurants in Ohio and West Virginia, said health insurance changes, and the possibility of rising premiums and costs, “affects every aspect of a business.”
“You have to look at hiring decisions, growth opportunities, your spending, inflation,” he said. “We’re still trying to figure out how this is going to affect us.”
He and other business owners at the forum said they would just like a better explanation, a better idea from the government, of how the insurance exchanges are going to work.
“Whether we like it or not, it’s the law, but at least we would be able to manage it,” he said.
For Gaswint, owner of Black Run Transmission in Frazeysburg, the changes likely mean he still won’t be able to afford to offer health insurance to his four employees.
“Inflation is also a part of it, because no one wants to pay me $150 an hour to work on their truck,” he said. “But do I raise prices or lower wages just to pay for health care? I don’t see how people can get paid less money, have to pay more for health insurance and still pay for a $9 hamburger.”
Most people in attendance Wednesday urged Walter Taylor, aide to U.S. Rep. Pat Tiberi, to tell Tiberi to do whatever he can to delay the health care mandate.
“Just delay it. We had a good system and they just took a bomb to the whole thing. We liked what we had,” Thompson said.