I hope that all of you had a blessed Easter Sunday with your family. I know that I did. My step-son, daughter-in-law, and 5 year old grandson, came over for honey-baked ham and scalloped potatoes.

I was glad to see them and to get to spend time with them and to get a chance to talk to my steep-son. He was let go, last Thursday, from the trucking company he worked for. He had consistently been one of their top drivers for over a year. However, that wasn’t enough. You see, his company, which is run out of the great White North, is slowing eliminating all of their company drivers, in favor of owner-operators.

The reason? The coming of Obamacare.

The 2012 National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans, predicts that the average per-employee cost of health coverage will rise about 6.5 percent in 2013 and that 58 percent of employers surveyed have already made plans to shift costs to their employees to reduce the hit that they will take.

Even though the study found that while very few employers anticipate canceling their health benefit plans after reform is fully implemented, smaller employers are nearly three times as likely to say they will. When asked whether they plan to end their employee health coverage in five years, after Obamacare is fully implemented, 16 percent of smaller employers (between 10 and 499 employees) said they probably would end their employee health plans. Only 6 percent of bigger companies claimed that they would cancel coverage once insurance exchanges go online and individual mandates and employer penalties become effective. (The penalties won’t apply to companies with fewer than 50 employees.)

Although Obamacare is not supposed to go into full effect until 2014, several aspects of it are due to swing into effect in 2013:

Exchange enrollment. Open enrollment for individual and small business health insurance exchanges begins Oct. 1, 2013. “Exchanges are probably the most important provision of health-care reform for small businesses because they will help lower costs and improve choice of plans,” says Erin Musgrave, communications director at Small Business Majority, an advocacy group that has pushed for health-care reform.

States have until the middle of November 2012 to declare whether they will operate their own exchanges or default to exchanges operated by the federal government. There is some question about how many states will have their exchanges ready for business by the Jan. 1, 2014, target date. The exchanges will allow individuals and small businesses with up to 100 employees to shop for qualified health insurance coverage online, using a one-stop option.

Tax implications. As in recent years, dating to tax year 2010, eligible employers that provide health coverage will again get a tax credit for up to 35 percent of their contribution toward employee insurance. The credit is calculated based on average wages and number of employees; it goes up to 50 percent for tax year 2014.

High-income individuals. For singles with modified adjusted gross income over $200,000 and married taxpayers with $250,000 MAGI, a 3.8 percent Medicare contribution tax will apply for tax year 2013 to investment income, including interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents.

W-2 reporting. Tax form W-2s issued in January 2013 for wages paid in 2012 must for the first time include a line showing the benefit employees receive from their employer-sponsored health care. The provision is an attempt to make health-care benefits and spending more transparent. Small companies may face an increase in their W-2 preparation costs to cover gathering that information and reporting it, Starkman says.

After this report was issed, the Obama Administration gave the states until December 14th of last year to declare for the Healthcare Exchanges. When the dust settled 26 states told the Administration to get lost, refusing to install Obmamcare in their states. That forces the Administration to scramble to run those exchanges, themselves.

That brings another problem.

If the White House can’t get their act together, and build these exchanges, it could mean that some of the states which opted out will not have an exchange in place by Oct. 1, 2013, the deadline for all exchanges to be operational.

The folks who wrote Obamacare did not foresee the states standing up to them, as demonstrated by the fact that there is no language in the law to address the possibility.

While Uncle Sugar has enough of our money to build these exchanges, they will have a rough time working with the different health insurance rules and regulations in each state, which have been set in place by the individual health insurance commissioners over several decades.

Another problem is one of the Obama Administration’s own device.

The law was written specifically to provide that a health-insurance exchange run by a state is eligible to receive subsidies from the federal government, but it does not state that an exchange run by the Department of Health and Human Services is eligible to receive the same money.

For now, the IRS is ignoring this fact, but someone eventually may mount a legal challenge over the issue, leaving the matter up to the courts to decide.

Meanwhile, businesses, such as the Trucking Company who just let my step-son go, will continue to lay off workers as they coping with this horrible economy and the upcoming mandates that will be forced upon them by Obamacare.

What a fiasco.

Until He Comes,

KJ