Good news from NFIB survey - SC Small Business Chamber of Commerce

Good news from our friends at the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) even if they don’t think it is good news. According to a non-random survey of 921 small business owners and operators released today by the NFIB, “64 percent reported that they pay more for insurance premiums per employee in 2013 than they did in 2012.”

This is great news! No one was predicting that Obamacare would result in actually a decrease in health insurance premiums for small businesses. The best hope was that the double-digit increases of the past 15 or more years that almost all small businesses were experiencing would be less prevalent and that many small business would find insurance even less costly because of the health insurance tax credits made available through Obamacare.

Now, even the Obamacare-hating NFIB is admitting that 36% of their selected small businesses are paying less in premiums in 2013 compared to 2012. The NFIB doesn’t give us a lot of detail about the increases that were experienced but we should assume that that is also good news for the Obamacare effect.

Here is how the NFIB report dealt with the rate increase issue: “36 percent of those under 20 employees saw premium rate increases of less than 10 percent last year (when they experienced increases) compared to 45 percent among firms over 20 employees.”

So let’s make the assumption (and that’s dangerous) that 36% of businesses with fewer than 20 employees and 36% of businesses with 20 or more employees had no premium increases. That would mean that more than 50% of all the small businesses in this survey had no increase in premiums or an increase less than double digits in 2013 compared to 2012.

This is an outstanding improvement over pre-Obamacare rates for small businesses. And this does not count possibly even better small business rates that these companies might find in the SHOP program of the Health Insurance Marketplaces when they are open.

Thanks, NFIB, for this good news. We’re heading in the right direction for small businesses.