Small businesses have turned their backs on the Affordable Care Act, says healthcare expert Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a public policy research organization.
“They call it the shop exchange [and] the coverage that’s offered through these shop exchanges is really substandard. It’s very expensive,” Turner said Tuesday on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.
“The government provides subsidies for small businesses to lure them into this coverage, but the subsidies themselves have a lot of very tricky thresholds.”
Turner said that for an average subsidy, the average wage of an employee has to be no more than $25,000 a year, and a small business can have no more than 25 employees to qualify for a full subsidy.
“So these very small businesses — hair dressers, garages — have to go through a lot of bureaucracy in order to qualify for these meager federal subsidies,” she said.