It’s no secret health insurance is expensive and growing more costly with each passing year. While offering health care insurance to employees could be a valuable method for attracting and maintaining top talent, a small business owner needs to weigh whether the pros outweigh the negatives.

According to Gary Albert, the owner of Cincinnati’s Integrated Planning Strategies LLC, says a small business owner should not contemplate purchasing health insurance for their employees unless the entity is profitable.

“You can’t be a startup and offer these benefits. You have to be around a few years to you know you can afford to pay for the insurance,” he says.

An important consideration for small business owners contemplating health insurance for their staff is not a change in Obamacare itself, but rather the insurance industry’s response to the ACA. That reaction, says Albert, impacts a small business owner’s ability to offer health insurance to their employees. Time was that when a husband and wife both worked at their family business, a group health insurance policy could be purchased for them since they were considered two people. However, today the insurance industry does not permit spouses to be counted as two people for the purposes of purchasing a group health plan. Instead, the couple is counted as one person, meaning another person must work at the company in order for it to secure a group policy. While that other person can be related to the couple by consanguinity, that individual must truly be employed by the company and want to obtain health insurance for the entity to be considered large enough for a group health insurance plan, says Albert.

The ACA, “doesn’t do anything they said it would do. It’s very complicated, very limited and very expensive,” he says.

A group health insurance plan allows its members greater flexibility when it comes to health care providers than do individual plans. When a person has an individual plan, they are only permitted to receive health care coverage from the various entities contracted with that insurance company, an extremely limiting reality.

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Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer who tweets as @girlwithapen.