Small businesses not being able to provide insurance seems to be a bit of a state by state issue. I've worked for three small businesses in the last ten years.

Small businesses not being able to provide insurance seems to be a bit of a state by state issue. I've worked for three small businesses in the last ten years. All of them offered significantly better health insurance plans than the large companies I've worked for. The largest of those small businesses had just five employees. The last company I worked for ended up dropping their insurance plan, but that was a desperate cost cutting measure on the way towards bankruptcy. It seems that similar businesses in California (I'm in Nevada) don't offer health insurance due to the cost. My wifes insurance currently covers my wife and son. It's prohibitively expensive to add dependents to the plan and it's actually worse than the plan I had previously. Her employer has around 3k employees. I keep seeing mixed arguments about the exchange. There doesn't seem to be any conclusive evidence that it is actually going to make health insurance more affordable for small businesses. The only thing that appears to make it more affordable is not the exchange itself, but the subsidies for small businesses that offer health insurance. That's just a cost shift to someone/somewhere else.