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Chickasha, a cottonseed company based out of Tifton, Georgia recently changed its policy on providing health care for its full-time employees.  After offering full-coverage health insurance for nearly 20 years, due to recent spike in costs, company executives decided that providing health insurance was no longer affordable. The CEO of the company claims that annual health insurance costs increased from just under $100,000 in the 2007-2008 fiscal year to nearly $400,000 by the 2011-2012 fiscal year. Due to such a dramatic and unstable increase in health care expenses, Chickasha has been forced to eliminate health insurance coverage to all employees.

The exponential increase in health care costs has increased across the board for nearly every small company. Due to ObamaCare requiring everyone to have some form of health insurance, the weight of that reality was indirectly placed on employers. The federal government, under the Affordable Health Care for America Act, requires all employers with over 50 employees to provide health care. Chickasha, with around 45 employees, barely misses the cut off. Also, due to the small size of the company, the CEO has been able to approach the situation on more of a case-by-case basis. Individual employees were approached and asked about their health care provisions and whether or not they were fully reliant on attaining health care from Chickasha. Many employees had spouses with jobs that could provide family health insurance. In that case, the employees were offered a small salary increase. Although, in cases where employees did not have spouses with jobs offering health insurance the employee would be offered an even higher salary increase. The salary increase enabled employees to search for their own health insurance plan.

  The ethical and moral dilemma that Chickasha is being faced with is whether or not it is necessary and reasonable to cut out all health insurance benefits for full-time employees. Many of the employees...