My small business has always provided health insurance for our employees in a group plan, but we recently realized that we are paying than 10-20 times more in our group plan than most employees would be paying if they got their insurance on their own through the marketplace. We are paying $350 - $800 per month depending on the employee for our bronze level plan, but it turns out a majority of them will be paying $20 - $30 per month with the new health care subsidies (combined with California’s subsidies).
Hence we are looking to drop our employee health insurance plan and compensate the employees in another way so it will be a win-win. They’ll get a nice bump up in compensation and we’ll avoid the astronomical health care costs.
After learning this, I can’t imagine why any small business with relatively low income employees would still be providing health care plans.