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Welcome to Fairfax Underground, a project site designed to improve communication among residents of Fairfax County, VA. Feel free to post anything Northern Virginia residents would find interesting.
The Obamacare Tax That Cost You $1,200 Last Year
Posted by:
Moe Fail
()
Date: March 11, 2014 06:09PM
The Obamacare Tax That Cost You $1,200 Last Year
PHARMA & HEALTHCARE 3/11/2014 @ 8:50AM |1,312 views
The president is traveling the country calling for an increase in the national minimum wage. “It is a clear choice,” the president stated in Connecticut last Thursday. “Raise workers’ wages, grow our economy, or give workers what amounts to another pay cut.”
The very next day, a widely circulated report by Towers Watson and the respected nonprofit National Business Group on Health (NBGH) came out, showing how the president himself has already given millions of American workers at all income levels a pay cut — to the tune of $100 a month last year.
This pay cut is the unintended consequence of a provision in the president’s signature policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare: a tax on employers, forwhat the federal government thinks is too much spending on employee health benefits. It goes by the Orwellian nickname “Cadillac Tax” — suggesting employers that fund generous health benefits are really just indulging their employees with leather seating and whitewall tires. The Cadillac Tax is a 40 percent excise tax on health benefits exceeding an annual limit ($10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families). When the tax provision was first introduced, its opponents included an unusual alliance of unions and business leaders. They lost.
Slated to go into effect in 2018, the mere threat of the Cadillac Tax has already decreased the income of millions of American workers, according to the Towers Watson/NBGH report. Anxious to avoid hitting the Cadillac Tax spending threshold, employers are quickly converting their benefits plans into high-deductible health plans (HDHPs). This keeps employer premiums lower while shifting more of the costs onto employees, who typically pay a lower premium, but in exchange pay nearly all their medical care out of pocket until they spend through the deductible of $1000 (or in many cases much more).
The Towers Watson/NBGH report suggests this rapid shift to high-deductible health plans explains the slowdown in employer health cost growth (now 4.1 percent, slower than any year in the past decade). This finding is consistent with another report from the federal agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, which attributed the relative stability in the growth of U.S. health spending (at 3.8 percent) partly to the rise of HDHPs.
The news for consumers isn’t so good. According to the Towers Watson/NBGH report, employees’ share of premium costs plus out-of-pocket costs increased by a whopping seven percent between 2013 and 2014.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2014/03/11/the-obamacare-tax-that-cost-you-1200-last-year/
PHARMA & HEALTHCARE 3/11/2014 @ 8:50AM |1,312 views
The president is traveling the country calling for an increase in the national minimum wage. “It is a clear choice,” the president stated in Connecticut last Thursday. “Raise workers’ wages, grow our economy, or give workers what amounts to another pay cut.”
The very next day, a widely circulated report by Towers Watson and the respected nonprofit National Business Group on Health (NBGH) came out, showing how the president himself has already given millions of American workers at all income levels a pay cut — to the tune of $100 a month last year.
This pay cut is the unintended consequence of a provision in the president’s signature policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare: a tax on employers, forwhat the federal government thinks is too much spending on employee health benefits. It goes by the Orwellian nickname “Cadillac Tax” — suggesting employers that fund generous health benefits are really just indulging their employees with leather seating and whitewall tires. The Cadillac Tax is a 40 percent excise tax on health benefits exceeding an annual limit ($10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families). When the tax provision was first introduced, its opponents included an unusual alliance of unions and business leaders. They lost.
Slated to go into effect in 2018, the mere threat of the Cadillac Tax has already decreased the income of millions of American workers, according to the Towers Watson/NBGH report. Anxious to avoid hitting the Cadillac Tax spending threshold, employers are quickly converting their benefits plans into high-deductible health plans (HDHPs). This keeps employer premiums lower while shifting more of the costs onto employees, who typically pay a lower premium, but in exchange pay nearly all their medical care out of pocket until they spend through the deductible of $1000 (or in many cases much more).
The Towers Watson/NBGH report suggests this rapid shift to high-deductible health plans explains the slowdown in employer health cost growth (now 4.1 percent, slower than any year in the past decade). This finding is consistent with another report from the federal agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid, which attributed the relative stability in the growth of U.S. health spending (at 3.8 percent) partly to the rise of HDHPs.
The news for consumers isn’t so good. According to the Towers Watson/NBGH report, employees’ share of premium costs plus out-of-pocket costs increased by a whopping seven percent between 2013 and 2014.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leahbinder/2014/03/11/the-obamacare-tax-that-cost-you-1200-last-year/
Re: The Obamacare Tax That Cost You $1,200 Last Year
Posted by:
FDR
()
Date: March 11, 2014 08:22PM
Yup...the idea that the employer paid health insurance benefit is tax free is an idea that has seen its day for the entitled who pay little or nothing for a...yes, cadillac insuarnce policy. Get over it.