EVEN FORBES MAGAZINE CAN TELL THE TRUTH

despite the fact that it goes against Steve Forbes ideology:

More Small Businesses Offering Health Care To Employees Thanks To Obamacare
Jan. 6 2011 - 2:18 pm
Rick Ungar
The Policy Page
FORBES

The first statistics are coming in and, to the surprise of a great many, Obamacare might just be working to bring health care to working Americans precisely as promised.

The major health insurance companies around the country are reporting a significant increase in small businesses offering health care benefits to their employees.

Why?

Because the tax cut created in the new health care reform law providing small businesses with an incentive to give health benefits to employees is working.

Ungar got the story from the LA Times:

More small businesses are offering health benefits to workers
The increase is partly attributed to a tax credit created by the nation's new healthcare law. Some insurers are aggressively marketing the break, which can offset up to 35% of a company's costs.
By Noam N. Levey, Los Angeles Times
December 27, 2010

Reporting from Gladstone, Mo. —

Major insurers around the country are reporting that a growing number of small businesses are signing up to give their workers health benefits, a sign of potential progress for the nation's battered healthcare system.

An important selling point has been a tax credit that the nation's new healthcare law provides to companies with fewer than 25 employees and moderate-to-low pay scales to help offset the cost of providing benefits.

In the six months after the law was signed in March, UnitedHealth Group Inc., the country's largest insurer, added 75,000 new customers who work for companies with fewer than 50 employees. The Minnesota company called the increase notable but declined to reveal further details.


Coventry Health Care Inc., an insurer in Maryland that focuses on small businesses, signed contracts to cover 115,000 new workers in the first nine months of this year, an 8% jump.

In California, Warner Pacific Insurance Services in Westlake Village, a major servicer of insurance brokers, has seen business grow more than 10% this year, a company executive said.

And Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, the largest insurer in the Kansas City, Mo., area, is reporting a 58% jump in the number of small businesses buying insurance since April, the first full month after the legislation was signed into law.