In 2011, Congress passed and President Obama signed a law reducing ACA’s reporting requirements for small businesses. It repealed a provision requiring businesses to report to the IRS any time they made a purchase of more than $600 to a single vendor.
In 2013, Congress passed and President Obama signed a repeal of Title VIII of the ACA, known as the CLASS Act, which had been one of Ted Kennedy’s contributions to the law. It was supposed to create “a voluntary and public long-term care insurance option for employees” once implemented, but the Obama administration determined it was unworkable so Congress went ahead and repealed it, which Obama signed.
In 2015, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Protecting Affordable Coverage for Employees Act which makes a minor fix in the definition of a small business that could result in thousands of dollars of savings for 150,000 businesses. Under the original law, small businesses of less than 50 employees have their own special rules requiring specific types of coverage with a higher cost to employers. Beginning in 2016, those special rules were scheduled to apply to small businesses of 51 to 100 employees.
The new law gives states the ability to decide how to classify businesses of 51 to 100 employees, potentially saving premiums for small business employees from going up 18 percent or more, according to an estimate from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman. And there's a bonus: Reducing workers' insurance premiums means increasing their taxable income, resulting in a $280 million in additional revenues to the federal government over 10 years. That money will go to bolster Medicaid.
Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, a prominent Obamacare critic, said the congressional action comes just under the wire, as insurance companies finish pricing contracts for 2016 coverage. And the quick, businesslike way in which the bill was passed just shows that neither side saw any benefit in politicizing the issue, she said.
"I think here the White House certainly doesn’t want to announce with big fanfare that the Republican Congress has led on making changes on the president's health law," she said. "And the Republicans don't want to say that they’re fixing it, because they want to repeal it entirely."