Green Energy
Obamacare Self extends by admin ruling, becomes more restrictive to businessmen
We see again that executive dept authorities, legislated into existence by Congress then self extend their breadth, their penetration and their ability to execute enforcement of these new ‘administrative’ rulings.
NYT:
I.R.S. Bars Employers From Dumping Workers Into Obamacare Health Exchanges
Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange with a tax-free contribution of cash to help pay premiums, but the Obama administration has squelched the idea in a new ruling. Such arrangements do not satisfy the health care law, the administration said, and employers may be subject to a tax penalty of $100 a day — or $36,500 a year — for each employee who goes into the individual marketplace.
The ruling this month, by the Internal Revenue Service, blocks any wholesale move by employers to dump employees into the exchanges.
Under a central provision of the health care law, larger employers are required to offer health coverage to full-time workers, or else the employers may be subject to penalties.
If you start a business you have to be thinking ..’why am I doing this?’ Oh, but Harry Reid knows…you OWE health insurance to your employees, even if YOU as an owner and no getting a regular salary to ensure the birth and growth of the business at the outset have NONE.
I know this because when I started a business I did without in order to ensure MUCH greater cash flow.
However, if your margin in business is tight, or you dip into loss..as well, there were many who thought by paying the $2,000 per employee fine the business would have a healthier bottom line, and the employee could hten enter the subsidized exchange program, some with vouchers from employers.
AT$36.5k per employee per year, this can;t happen.
It gets even worse….
When employers provide coverage, their contributions, averaging more than $5,000 a year per employee, are not counted as taxable income to workers. But the Internal Revenue Service said employers could not meet their obligations under the health care law by simply reimbursing employees for some or all of their premium costs.
Christopher E. Condeluci, a former tax and benefits counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, said the ruling was significant because it made clear that “an employee cannot use tax-free contributions from an employer to purchase an insurance policy sold in the individual health insurance market, inside or outside an exchange.”
If an employer wants to help employees buy insurance on their own, Mr. Condeluci said, it can give them higher pay, in the form of taxable wages. But in such cases, he said, the employer and the employee would owe payroll taxes on those wages, and the change could be viewed by workers as reducing a valuable benefit.
I don’t underpants. If Obamacare is so great, why would n’t Obama WELCOME more people in the system, many of whom would be healthy young workers, some of whom would be getting higher pay, even if they had to pay taxes on it.(But the employer then gets fined)
They wouldn’t be afraid these workers might choose on their own NOT to purchase individual insurance would they?
Why would they be afraid of that?
“For decades,” Mr. Biebl said, “employers have been assisting employees by reimbursing them for health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. The new federal ruling eliminates many of those arrangements by imposing an unusually punitive penalty.”
When an employer reimburses employees for premiums, the arrangement is known as an employer payment plan. “These employer payment plans are considered to be group health plans,” the I.R.S. said, but they do not satisfy requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
Under the law, insurers may not impose annual limits on the dollar amount of benefits for any individual, and they must provide certain preventive services, like mammograms and colon cancer screenings, without co-payments or other charges.
But the administration said employer payment plans do not meet those requirements.
Richard K. Lindquist, the president of Zane Benefits in Park City, Utah, a software company that helps employers reimburse workers for health insurance costs, said, “The I.R.S. is going out of its way to keep employers in the group insurance market and to reduce the incentives for them to drop coverage.”
Why does the federal govt wish to penetrate further every year, sometime every month, by these administrative rulings, NONE passed by the people we vote for, into our day to day lives?
Note that this is true of the IRS/Obamacare (which the Supreme court rules a tax, thus giving IRS the enforcement), BLM, the Dept of Agriculture and other dept’s born of the executive branch, which maintain [private armies with SUBMACHINEGUNS?
Of course ASKING these questions, immediately makes ME some kind of tea party extremist, right wing fanatic, RIGHT?
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