Following implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the share of people insured through employer-sponsored plans dropped 2.3 percentage points in Massachusetts, according to a new study led by Benjamin Sommers, associate professor of health policy and economics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The drop was mainly among small employers, which the authors attributed to Massachusetts’ decision to remove a requirement that employers with as few as 11 employees offer insurance, in favor of the ACA requirement that companies with more than 50 employees provide health insurance.
“Since they got rid of the mandate (in Massachusetts), we’ve seen this decline. We’d suggest to policymakers that undoing the employer mandate (nationally) will have the same effect,” Sommers said in a July 16, 2018 Boston Business Journal article.
Read the Boston Business Journal article: Harvard study: Obamacare caused many in Mass. to lose employer insurance