Who Must Offer Health Insurance? 
There remains a lot of confusion over this issue in the wake of the passing of the health care reform law -LRB- ObamaCare , the Affordable Care Act -RRB- and justifiably so . Technically speaking , ObamaCare does not force any employer to offer health insurance to their employees , their is no criminal penalty for failure to do so . That point made , the Affordable Care Act consists of a mix of tax incentives and tax penalties to supposedly induce employers to provide health insurance for their employees . First of all , for employers with 2 to49 employees there are no tax penalties at all for failure to provide health insurance to their employees . A tax credit is offered but with enough limitations associated with it that only a tiny percentage of small employers have ever taken advantage of it . For employers who are at and above the 50 full time and/or full time equivalent employee level they will be the ones who will be faced with tax penalties for failing to provide health insurance and/or failing to provide affordable health insurance to their employees . The first employers to be impacted will be those with 100 or more full time employees in 2015 . Then , starting in 2016 , employers in the 50 to 99 employee range will be subject to the same tax penalty . The tax penalty will be $ 2000 per employee per year and will be a non-deductible business expense . Not surprisingly , the situation is more complicated than I have just described but there is not space here to go into all the details involved . Suffice it to say , this is an issue of great concern to many employers , especially ones who have not offered health insurance to their employees or a large segment of their employees in the past . The restaurant , hospitality and trucking industries are some common examples of industries that can expect to be adversely impacted financially by the tax penalty . For consultation on this issue please feel free to contact me . 