HEALTH BENEFITS REPORT
Excise tax likely to be extricated
If you have followed the continuing saga of
the Affordable Care Act Excise Tax, more commonly referred to erroneously as the Cadillac
Tax, and have had the relentless misinformed
statements transferred to you via your employer’s labor representatives and their self-servingopinions, I am happy to inform you that it
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appears as though the jig is up.
No longer will your employers’ agents be able
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to leverage negotiations through a tax that will
never exist.
From its conception, the excise tax was a mechanism to
fund the subsidies for low-income citizens that the
Affordable Care Act created. It’s very interesting that law
enforcement is getting taxed twice, (Chapter 78 and the
excise tax) while others get money to pay their premiums. It
was also supposed to be a penalty that would create lower
medical costs. Well, in the terms of my teenage boys, “EPIC
FAIL.”
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The fact of the matter is that the tax never took into account
the elevated costs of health care in the Northeast, nor the fact
that prescription drugs escalate at the rate of 14 to 18 percent per
year. The State Health Benefits Plan is already over the excise tax
threshold by about $4,000.
Philosophically, I find it interesting that the U.S. Congress
chose to tax the working class, instead of managing the out-ofcontrol health care industry. The good news is that on this issue,
it seems as though they woke up!
There are two places to refer your employers when they bring
up the Excise Tax: The first is HR 2050. This bill was written
expressly to repeal the Excise Tax. Currently, 174 members of
Congress have signed on to this bill and the support is bipartisan.
The Omnibus Spending Bill, which is being finalized as I write
this article, will at the very least push back the implementation
of the tax from 2018 to 2020.
As I have written previously, do not make any concessions
based on the excise tax. It does not exist now, and, most likely, it
won’t in the future. d