As more requirements of the health care law take effect, income tax filing season becomes more complex for small businesses.
Companies required to offer health insurance have new forms to complete providing details of their coverage. Owners whose payrolls have hovered around the threshold where insurance is mandatory need to be sure their coverage — if they offered it last year — was sufficient to avoid penalties.
Even the most tax-savvy owners may find that do-it-yourself doesn’t work when it comes to fulfilling the law’s requirements. Many don’t know about the intricacies of the new health care regulations associated with the law that affect employers, says Lydia Glatz, an accountant with the firm MBAF in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
“Most small businesses and mom-and-pop operations,” Glatz says. “They’re more involved in running their day-to-day business.”
President Barack Obama will propose reducing the bite of the unpopular “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health insurance plans in the budget he releases next week, in a bid to preserve a key element of the Affordable Care Act.
Jason Furman, the White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that the president’s plan would reflect regional differences in the cost of health care, reducing the tax’s bite where care is particularly expensive.
“This policy prevents the tax from creating unintended burdens for firms located in areas where health care is particularly expensive, while ensuring that the policy remains targeted at overly generous plans over the long term,” Furman wrote in the Journal article.
There is little congressional appetite to revisit ObamaCare’s Cadillac tax in an election year, but that’s not stopping the coalition opposing it from campaigning about it.
Fight the 40, the coalition that includes unions and Fortune 500 companies as members, is still pushing for a full repeal of the 40 percent excise tax on employer-sponsored health benefits above a certain threshold. The tax was originally scheduled to go into effect in 2018 but was pushed back two more years in December.
“We will continue our work to highlight how the tax creates age, gender, and geographic disparities and how it impacts vulnerable demographics,” the group said in a memo shared first with Morning Consult.
Two studies published in the most recent Health Affairs journal raise questions about the contention that the Affordable Care Act will reduce employment, wages, and hours worked by employees.
The study by Gooptu and colleagues examined the effects of the law’s Medicaid expansion on employment and found no statistically significant effect through March 2015. A related study by Moriya and colleagues examined the subsidy structure provided to households getting health insurance through the ACA’s exchanges and similarly found no discernible effect on levels of part-time employment for employees eligible for these subsidies.
These studies provide useful new information, but they do not mean, as some reporting on them seems to suggest, that there is nothing to worry about with respect to the ACA’s effects on labor markets. Given the structure of the ACA, it would be hard to conclude the law would not eventually reduce hours worked or total compensation, although the magnitude of the resulting changes may be hard to detect in the U.S.’s large and complex labor markets.
The term “Cadillac tax” is evocative: It suggests that the health-insurance plans it would tax—through a provision in the Affordable Care Act—are to regular health insurance as a Cadillac is to a Kia. President Obama once described the levy as targeting “really fancy [health insurance] plans that end up driving up costs.”
But what many Americans may not realize is that “Cadillac tax” is in part a misnomer. While some plans that qualify for the tax may be high-end with extra benefits, or “really fancy,” not all of them are. Nor is every employee with an expensive plan a corporate executive. Over time, the number of Americans affected by the tax is expected to increase, as is the revenue the government expects to raise from their plans.
The U.S. government will limit a process that allowed people to sign up for health insurance under ObamaCare outside of the normal enrollment period. Typically, individuals have from about November to January to purchase insurance under ObamaCare. In some cases, though, they’re allowed to sign up outside that period, such as when they have a child.
The government is also tightening an exception that let people sign-up when they moved, by clarifying that people can’t get coverage based on a short-term or temporary relocation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a blog post on Tuesday. It also plans to more tightly enforce other limits on enrollment by making sure people are qualified to sign-up in the remaining special circumstances.
A new survey from payroll services giant ADP reveals that about 40% of mid-sized and large companies that are offering health coverage to workers aren’t familiar with two new ObamaCare-related forms that must be filed with the Internal Revenue Service starting this tax season.
The forms — the 1094-C and the 1095-C — are designed to track compliance with the ObamaCare rule that mid- to large-sized employers offer affordable health insurance to workers or face a fine.
The president is sure to laud ObamaCare at his final State of the Union speech on Tuesday. And no doubt he’ll boast about the 11.3 million people enrolled in an ObamaCare exchange by the end of the year. That may look like “unprecedented demand” to Obama administration officials. But in fact, it’s an ominous sign that ObamaCare is losing what little luster it had in the marketplace. 11.3 million is nothing to celebrate when you consider that at the end of open enrollment last year, the administration claimed that 11.7 million had signed up. By the end of the entire year, that number had been whittled down to about 9 million, of which 8.2 million re-enrolled.
December’s omnibus budget package contained a measure to delay a provision of the Affordable Care Act by two years is giving finance chiefs some extra time to prepare.
The tax on high-cost employee health plans, or “Cadillac” tax, puts employers on the hook for a 40% levy on any excess cost of health plans above certain thresholds. Even before the delay, many companies and municipalities had already begun to assess whether their plans would trigger additional payments and make preemptive changes to avoid it.
If it’s December, it must be time for a massive, one-time, all-or-nothing annual spending bill. That’s just what has become of Congress’s core function over the past decade. This year’s version includes a 2,009 page omnibus appropriations bill and a 233 page tax bill mostly extending various “temporary” tax preferences and other provisions.
Republicans have majorities in both houses, so this bill reflects their priorities on the whole. But on health care, it’s actually most interesting for what it suggests about the Democrats—some meaningful number of whose votes are after all necessary for passage.