Don’t repeal the ACA: It’s working for small businesses

As federal lawmakers look to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) this month, a critical point is getting lost in all the partisan talk: The ACA is working, especially for small business owners.  

Not long after I started Hobby Works in 1992, I began offering health coverage to my employees. That decision wasn’t just about attracting and retaining quality workers; as a former retail employee myself, I had found it difficult to get good, affordable insurance.

{mosads}Although my business has been successful enough that I expanded over the years to four locations in the D.C. area and nearly 50 total employees (30 full-time equivalent employees), I found it increasingly difficult to offer health insurance to my workers. Prior to the ACA, we saw annual premium increases of 15-20 percent or more. As a result, we were forced to ask employees to pay more of their own premiums and face higher deductibles in order to continue offering them coverage.

The numbers make clear just how much my business and my employees benefited from the ACA: In the years prior to implementation, we experienced premium increases of 18-21 percent. Once the ACA’s provisions started going into effect however, our rates started improving; we experienced increases of only 7-8 percent.

Other small business owners struggled before the ACA, too. Small Business Majority’s scientific opinion polling found that of employers who didn’t offer health insurance to their employees, 70 percent said they didn’t provide it because they couldn’t afford it. What’s more, small businesses paid 18 percent more on average for health coverage than large companies and received fewer comprehensive benefits.

The Affordable Care Act was the first legislation in years to give me hope that this spiral of escalating costs and depreciating quality of coverage might finally end. Thanks to the healthcare law’s cost-containment provisions, our premiums have started to stabilize. What’s more, we now have more options when it comes to insurance carriers and health plans. Where we had only a few carriers to choose from in the past, we can now select between a variety of insurers that each offer many health plans, amounting to more than 100 options for my business to choose from.

While some claim that the healthcare law is a job killer and that small businesses are being forced to make their full-time employees cut their hours, I can say that this has not impacted my business at all. We don’t make expansion decisions based on tax law; we do this based on consumer confidence and how we expect sales to increase over time. We have never thought of expanding or shrinking based on the healthcare law’s requirements.

Given that there is a lot of talk right now about “repealing and replacing” the ACA, it’s important to consider that there are only a handful of options for a healthcare structure: we could go back to what we had before the ACA, which is not realistic; we could implement a single-payer system, which is unpopular; or we could continue with a private insurance-based hybrid system that is a form of the ACA.

I’ll acknowledge that the ACA is not perfect. But instead of a full repeal, let’s expand on what is already working and make improvements where they are needed. After all, the ACA is the first meaningful reform in decades that meets many of small businesses’ core needs in regard to rising healthcare costs. To keep the economy growing, we need policies that allow us to spend less on health premiums so we can keep more of our own profits to reinvest in our companies and create jobs. Repealing a law that works will accomplish none of those things.

Mike Brey is president of Hobby Works and a member of Small Business Majority’s Small Business Council.  

The views expressed by authors are their own and not the views of The Hill.