The Obama administration is giving businesses a break under the Affordable Care Act. The federal health care law requires companies with 50 or more workers to provide full-time employees insurance coverage or pay fines.
The employer mandate was supposed to take effect January first, but in a decision announced Tuesday, implementation is being delayed one year to 2015.
"We feel like this is the number one issue for businesses right now. There's a lot of uncertainty that comes with the law," says Ashli Watts with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. "There's tens of thousands of pages of regulations to sift through."
Watts adds that making sense of the law is especially difficult for smaller companies.
"For larger businesses, they have HR people, attorneys, CPAs that can help them navigate through this. Mom and pop businesses may not have those resources," explains Watts.
Businesses have complained the employer mandate is too complicated. For example, the law created a new definition of full-time workers, those putting in 30 hours or more.
The Kentucky Chamber of Commerce says businesses they've heard from are most concerned with what the federal health care law means to their bottom line.
