Opt-out payments offered by employers may be used to determine affordability under the Affordable Care Act, depending on whether they are conditional or unconditional, according to IRS proposed rules.
Under the proposed rules, opt-out payments, cash payments given to employees who opt-out of their employer-sponsored health insurance, will be treated as a salary reduction for the purposes of determining health insurance affordability if they are considered unconditional.
An unconditional opt-out payment refers to an arrangement where the employee declines employer-sponsored health insurance without satisfying any other requirements.
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The Affordable Care Act opened the door for millions of young adults to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26.
But there’s a downside to remaining on the family plan.
Chances are that Mom or Dad, as policyholder, will get a notice from the insurer every time the grown-up kid gets medical care, a breach of privacy that many young people may find unwelcome.
With this in mind, in recent years a handful of states have adopted laws or regulations that make it easier for dependents to keep medical communications confidential.
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The GOP House blueprint for health reform repeals these taxes. Specifically, the report cites:
- the 3.8 percent bracket in the Medicare payroll and self-employment tax
- the 3.8 percent “net investment income tax” (NIIT) on savings and investment
- the additional 10 percentage point surtax for non-qualified health savings account (HSA) withdrawals
- the “medicine cabinet tax” which denies the use of pre-tax HSA, health reimbursement arrangement (HRA), and flexible spending account (FSA) dollars for the purchase of non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines
- the $2500 cap on medical FSA deferrals
- the “Cadillac plan” tax of 40 percent on high cost health insurance plans
- the “health insurance tax” (HIT)
- the tax penalties associated with the individual and employer mandates
- the medical device excise tax
- the industry tax on pharmaceutical companies
- the “high medical bills tax” which disallows an itemized deduction for medical expenses for millions of middle class families
- a tax on employers helping their retired employees purchase Medicare Part D plans
Today, after years of hearings and speeches and debates, the Paul Ryan-led House of Representatives has done something it has not done before: it has released a comprehensive, 37-page proposal to reform nearly every federal health care program, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. No proposal is perfect—and we’ll get to the Ryan plan’s imperfections—but, all in all, we would have a far better health care system with the Ryan plan than we do today.
The first thing to know about the Ryan-led plan — part of a group of proposals called “A Better Way” — is that it’s not a bill written in legislative language. Nor is it a plan that has been endorsed by every House Republican.
Instead, it’s a 37-page white paper which describes, in a fair amount of detail, a kind of “conversation starter” that House GOP leadership hopes to have with its rank-and-file members, and with the public, in order to consolidate support around a more market-based approach to health reform.
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The number of part-time workers in jobs for economic reasons shot up by 468,000, apart from the 458,000 that left the workforce altogether. Slack work or business conditions accounted for 181,000 of these jobs, while another 77,000 could only find part-time work.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs have noticed this trend for some time, and put the blame on Obamacare.
“The evidence suggests that the [Affordable Care Act] has at least modestly elevated involuntary part-time employment,” Goldman Sachs economist Alec Philips wrote in a research note published on Wednesday. Obamacare had the greatest impact on industries that traditionally do not offer strong health insurance coverage, such as retail stores and the hospitality industry. Phillips noted that these have the highest levels of involuntary part-time workers, and believes that the ACA has forced “a few hundred thousand” to take cuts in hours or accept part-time work as a result.
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Health insurance is about to bear a higher price tag. Experts at the Kaiser Family Foundation just warned that premiums are likely to jump in 2017 — after increasing an average of more than 12 percent this year.
High-deductible health plans paired with tax-advantaged Health Savings Accounts (HSA) have emerged as a source of a lower-cost refuge for patients, who accept the high deductible in exchange for lower premiums.
The Obama administration is trying to restrict access to HSAs. That’s a mistake. HSAs empower consumers to take control of their health care and reduce overall health spending in the process. Our leaders should be working to expand access to them, not narrow it.
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The Supreme Court unanimously remanded a case challenging the ACA’s contraceptive mandate back to the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Fifth, Tenth and D.C. Circuits. The decision will give the parties an opportunity to reach a compromise that “accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise” while ensuring women covered by the petitioner’s health plans receive coverage that includes contraception. The Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, which brought the lawsuit one behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor, called the ruling a win for the petitioners.
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Most big employers provide wellness programs now, and the Affordable Care Act gave the idea a boost in 2010 by letting companies offer employees financial incentives— such as lower health insurance premiums, gift cards or prizes—worth up to 30 percent of the cost of their health insurance.
But as the wellness industry has grown, questions have started to arise about just how effective these programs really are—and how fair. It’s not clear the programs financially benefit employers, and evidence is also mixed on whether they make employees healthier. And now, some employees have begun to bristle at the omnipresence of wellness in corporate culture and see the requirement to share personal health data with their employer as an intrusion on their privacy.
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The desire for autonomy and work-life balance is driving more workers into freelance roles, but at the same time there are growing incentives for companies to employ workers via contracts rather than hire them full-time.
Chief among those incentives is the cost of providing (or not providing) health care to workers under the Affordable Care Act. Nearly three-quarters of companies said that they would contract with more freelancers this year because of Obamac\Care, according to a new survey by online work platform Field Nation and executive development firm Future Workplace.
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One provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that has been delayed until 2017 is a federal mandate for standard menu items in restaurants and some other venues to contain nutrition labeling.
Drawing on nearly 300,000 respondents from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System from 30 large cities between 2003 and 2012, we explore the effects of menu mandates. We find that the impact of such labeling requirements on BMI, obesity, and other health-related outcomes is trivial, and, to the extent it exists, it fades out rapidly.