It is arbitrary, but we have to draw the line somewhere.

It is not about money, tax is about money. This is about the extra work needed to accommodate for said obligations, it can involve several full time jobs, and the state considers that it is too much for a company of less than 50 employees.

Really, it is a lot of paperwork, and the more a company spends on paperwork, the less there is to pay employees.

Could this be improved by a government agency where they do this paperwork for you at a per-employee cost if your company is under X employees (say 3x the limit at which the paperwork kicks in)?

The easiest improvement would be to remove the employer from the equation and just provide taxpayer-funded benefits to all. The main reasons employers are still involved are inertia followed by a concern that employees won't feel as obligated to stay in shit jobs.

Sounds like socialism, though. Can’t have that!

I think there are arguments to be made in favor of a more free market approach (or a less free market one.) At this moment we seem to have the worst of both worlds.

> Why not just force benefits for all employees?

Public perception. Small business owners occupy a different perceptual space than large businesses. Lawmakers don't want to be perceived as hurting small businesses and craft laws to avoid it. It's more about maintaining political power as much as anything else.

I thought of this too, and it’s actually good system. Those small businesses should be exempt I think. It’s only the large corporations that should be forced to pay (I wouldn’t even be opposed to subsidizing health care for those businesses by taxing larger ones more.)

I think a system where we go by revenue is a lot of logical than going by number of employees. If a business makes 1Bpy but only has two employees, would it not be exempt from the current regulations?

It works out great for everyone except the 47.5% of Americans who are employed by small businesses.

Not really? I’ve mentioned in both comments that we should arbitrate based on revenue, not number of employees. I also said I’m the comment you replied to we could potentially subsidize the benefits at smaller businesses with a tax on the largest. Not saying this would work, or even that the math is sound, but I have definitely addressed your point twice.

Revenue isn't always a great way to measure the size of a business, because different businesses add different amount of value. And you can't use profit, because that's easy to game. For something like people benefits, predicating the requirement on the number of people employed makes a lot of sense. It's about as much work to setup a health plan for a two person firm as a 50 person firm, but many fewer people benefit.

I don’t disagree, I just think that using number of employees seems like one of the worst possible ways to handle company reaching X size. I came up with that off the top of my head there are surely better solutions.