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Patrick Hansen, the chief financial officer of Strattec Security Corp., has no pretensions of knowing how the Affordable Care Act will affect employers years from now.

But for now, Strattec, based in Glendale, has no plans to stop offering health benefits to its employees.

"We'd have a hard time recruiting," Hansen said.

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act — among them Wisconsin Republicans Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Ron Johnson — have contended that the law will result in employers no longer offering health benefits. Now Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and former adviser in the Obama administration when the law was making its tortuous way through Congress, is contending the same.

In his new book, "Reinventing American Health Care," Emanuel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a steadfast defender of the law, contends the Affordable Care Act will lead to a sharp drop in employers who offer health benefits.

Most supporters of the law — and some policy analysts and economists ambivalent about it — don't see that happening.

"At the margin, it is not going to have a big impact on whether employers drop coverage," said Robert Town, a health economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hansen noted one commonly cited reason: Employers offer health benefits to retain and attract workers with the skills needed to run their businesses and organizations, and health insurance is a prized benefit. The Affordable Care Act doesn't change that.

Another is that the tax code bestows generous tax breaks for health insurance obtained through an employer.

Consider the math. Nationally, the average premium for family coverage through an employer was $16,351 last year, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust.

Workers paid an average of $4,565 toward the cost.

The share of the premium paid by employers — roughly 72% on average for family coverage — was tax-free compensation for a worker. And workers can pay their share of the premium with pretax dollars.

People who buy health insurance on their own don't get that tax break.

This means people in the 25% tax bracket who bought family coverage on their own for $16,351 would pay about $4,087 more in taxes — not including state taxes.

That provides a strong incentive for health insurance to remain a prized benefit.

"It's huge," Hansen said, "especially if you had to buy a family benefit."

Massachusetts model

There are others reasons to expect employers to continue to offer health benefits.

To retain the tax benefits, a company must offer health insurance to all its employees, from the CEO on down. The Affordable Care Act also requires employers who don't offer health benefits to pay a penalty or tax of $2,000 for each full-time employee.

Employers in Massachusetts didn't stop offering coverage after the state put in place health reforms that were a model for the Affordable Care Act. The reverse happened. More employers began offering health benefits.

Emanuel acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that what happened in Massachusetts is the best argument against his prediction.

Surveys by benefit consultants haven't found any signs that employers will drop health benefits. In February, Aon Hewitt said a survey of 1,230 employers found that 95% plan to continue offering coverage in the next three to five years.

Matt Weimer, director of employer benefit operations for Diversified Insurance Solutions in Brookfield, said he can't name any clients who have said they plan to drop coverage.

But he expects small employers — particularly those with fewer than 10 workers — to stop offering benefits.

"Those groups really have struggled for some time to offer benefits," Weimer said.

Only 45% of employers with three to nine workers offered health benefits last year, down from 57% in 2000, according to the Kaiser survey. The same trend can be seen among employers with 10 to 24 workers: 68% offered health benefits last year, down from 80% in 2000.

Nearly all employers — 99% — with 200 or more employees, in contrast, offered benefits.

Restaurants, hotels, nursing homes and other employers with a large percentage of low-wage workers — who may value larger paychecks more than health benefits — also could stop offering benefits over time, Weimer said.

In March 2012, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that 3 million fewer people would get health insurance through their employers in 2022 because of the law. By comparison, an estimated 159 million would get health insurance through an employer that year.

That is just a projection. Under different scenarios, the Congressional Budget Office estimates range from a reduction of 20 million to a gain of 3 million people with employer coverage.

"We surely should expect that some employers are going to stop offering coverage to their employees as a result of the Affordable Care Act," said Craig Garthwaite, a health economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. "That is going to be a good thing for those employees and for the employer."

Low-wage workers would be eligible for federal subsidies if their employer doesn't provide affordable health benefits, he said. In some cases, they would be better off buying insurance on their own through the marketplaces.

The employees would lose the tax benefit. But low-wage workers pay relatively little, if any, federal taxes.

Garthwaite also said employers' responses will vary by company and industry.

"Remember, ultimately what the employer wants is to craft the most cost-effective package they can give to get the quality of employee they want," he said.

Easier to shop

More employers can consider dropping health benefits because the new regulations imposed on health insurers makes it easier to get coverage outside the workplace.

Insurers no longer can deny coverage for someone with medical problems, for example, and are limited in how much more they can charge older people than younger people.

In the past, when an employer dropped coverage, workers with health problems may have been unable to buy health insurance and older workers would have had to pay much higher rates.

"My employer is not giving me insurance," Garthwaite said. "I am just taking my compensation in that form."

All this depends on how the marketplace evolves: how the health plans compare with employer coverage, what the plans cost, whether the marketplaces make it easier to shop for insurance.

"We don't know the answer to that yet," he said.

But he expects that the marketplaces eventually will be easier to use and will give consumers more and better information.

"We've never done this before," Garthwaite said. "Over time, we will get better at it."

Town, of the University of Pennsylvania, even goes a step further. He expects the Affordable Care Act to affect the economy only on the margins. And he makes a prediction of his own.

"Years from now," he said, "we will think, 'My God, we talked a lot about that.'"