If you’re a small business owner, you’ve no doubt been watching the whole health care reform process with bated breath. Perhaps more than anyone else in the country, you stand to gain or lose a great deal depending on how things shake out. If you have employees and already provide medical insurance, you want to know how it will affect your costs. If you don’t provide insurance coverage yet, you doubtless want to know what will be required of you under the new laws.

Since the laws don’t start taking effect until 2014, we still have a while to wait to see how they will really affect us. Whether we own a small business or just work for one, there are some features of the new legislation that we can be sure will affect us, but much of it is still a mystery, and there are still three and a half years for lawmakers to make revisions to the bills before they take effect.

As it stands now, here are some of the likely effects (benefits and liabilities) for small businesses:

• All Americans will be required by law to have insurance. Of course, this means you. It also means your employees. So, if you don’t insure them, they will need to find private insurance. Some employees might simply look for other employment rather than paying premiums, so be sure to take that into consideration when you make decisions regarding employees’ medical insurance.

• Small companies will be able to band together to purchase insurance at lower rates normally reserved for larger groups. Each state is required to make provisions for smaller companies to do this. These Small Business Health Options Programs (known as SHOP exchanges) will be available to companies with 50 or fewer employees, and in some cases to companies with up to 100 employees.

• Part of the costs of providing medical insurance will be defrayed by the government. At present, it looks like 35% of the costs will be covered for the first two years. While it still might be cheaper to pay the $750 per employee fine, the government picking up more than a third of the insurance tab will lower the cost of insuring your employees significantly.

• If you have fewer than 50 employees, you most likely won’t be directly affected or required to provide insurance. As previously noted, though, even if you’re not required to provide it, your employees are going to be required to have it, and in many cases, it will be easier to get a different job with medical insurance than to buy it for themselves.

Small business owners should be watching this closely, both the good and bad parts of it. There is still time to contact your congressman if you have any concerns or suggestions. Health care in this country is going to change, but you can have a voice in molding what that looks like.

Photo via reynolds.james.e