… but not necessarily the spouse.
NY Times: Employers Must Offer Family Care, Affordable or Not
Interesting tidbits:
- The rules offer no guarantee of affordable insurance for a worker’s children or spouse.
- The new rules, to be published in the Federal Register, create a strong incentive for employers to put money into insurance for their employees rather than dependents.
- This is troublesome: It is unclear whether the spouse and children of an employee will be able to obtain federal subsidies to help them buy coverage — separate from the employee…
- What is affordable? “Coverage for an employee under an employer-sponsored plan is affordable if the employee’s required contribution for self-only coverage does not exceed 9.5 percent of the employee’s household income.”
- Spouse alert: “Dependent does not include the spouse of an employee,” the proposed rules say.
Will your small business fall under these rules? It does if it has 50 full time equivalent employees. An example:
The new rules apply to employers that have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees. A full-time employee is a person employed on average at least 30 hours a week. And 100 half-time employees are considered equivalent to 50 full-time employees.
Thus, the government said, an employer will be subject to the new requirement if it has 40 full-time employees working 30 hours a week and 20 half-time employees working 15 hours a week.