What Restaurant Owners Need to Know About the Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a comprehensive healthcare reform law and has a significant set of regulatory changes that employers need to know about. The Employer Shared Responsibility Payment (ESRP) provisions are a component of the ACA directed at employers.

What Employers Need to Know about the ACA and ESRP:

• Requires Applicable Large Employers (ALEs), employers with 50 or more full-time employees and full-time equivalent employees, to offer Minimum Essential Coverage (MEC) to at least 95% of their full-time workforce. This is especially important and confusing for restaurant owners. A full-time employee does not have to work 40 hours. To be full-time under the rules of the ACA, employees only need to work 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month.
  
  Restaurants make this mistake time and time again. And when they inaccurately set this hourly requirement for being full-time, many employees get incorrectly grouped into the wrong designation.

• If your employee is identified as "full-time", an employer may be required to receive an offer of coverage by the first day of the fourth calendar month from their date of hire.

• Restaurant owners must also make sure they are offering an affordable health insurance plan. "Affordable" means the health insurance plan must cost less than 9.5% of the employee's annual household income.