You may be losing some patients: Nearly one in ten bosses say they'll pay a penalty rather than come up to the ACA's standards.
The study from Deloitte, reports the Wall Street Journal, says "9% of companies in the Deloitte study said they expected to stop offering insurance in the next one to three years."
And it may be more than that: "Around 81% were planning to continue providing benefits, and 10% weren't sure."
Companies with 50-100 workers were more likely (13% to 2%) to say they would drop coverage, per the Journal.
The likelihood that some businesses would find the terms of the Affordable Care Act so financially burdensome that they would elect to stop offering health insurance has come up before. A House Ways and Means Committee report this year found that Fortune 100 companies "could save an estimated $28.6 billion in 2014 alone by eliminating health insurance coverage for their more than 5.9 million U.S. employees... and instead paying the $2,000 per full-time employee fine created in the Democrats’ health care law." The McKinsey consultancy even found that "30% of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI [employer-sponsored insurance] in the years after 2014."
It has been counterargued, as the Washington Post recently did using a Truven Health Analytics study, that employers are not so likely to go through with it, because they don't gain much by dropping insurance, and would lose an important tax break if they did. Truven also says workers would wind up spending much more on health costs without an employee-sponsored plan, even considering the ACA alternatives, though this is probably not a big influence on companies' decisions.
We'll see soon enough what employers will really do -- 2014's not far off. But this survey does remind us that the practice patient profile is about to go through a big shift, and you may not be able to count on an insurer's referrals to stock your patient pool. Maybe you should reexamine your marketing.