Health care conundrum

The new health care bill is on everyone’s mind, so I’m going to turn over this space to ANLA’s Corey Connors, who outlined some of the important points of the legislation.
   
The “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (PPACA) includes a “soft” employer mandate, in the form of penalties and fines, contained in the PPACA. It defines a small business has having 50 or fewer full-time employees, and imposes a penalty on employers with 50 or more workers that fail to provide coverage. The PPACA language allows for businesses to go over the 50 employee limit for 120 days when using seasonal employees without triggering the mandate. The reconciliation bill (the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act or HCEARA) would make a couple of changes to the PPACA if passed and enacted. Namely, the calculation for employers failing to meet their coverage obligation would be altered and amounts of the fines would be changed.
   
HCEARA would also add in a calculation for part-time employees for seasonal workers to count toward the number of employees in a given year.