The Other Shoe Drops on Businesses From Obamacare: Reporting
A lot of discussion has gone into the costs of the employer mandate.
These costs certainly were potentially high for my company. If we had to provide health care for all of our employees, it would cost us an annual sum between 3 and 4 times our annual profit. As many of your know, my company runs public parks and campgrounds. Already, we have struggled to get government authorities to approve fee increases driven by local minimum wage increases. Most of these authorities have already told us that they would not allow fee increases in most cases to offset the costs of the PPACA employer mandate. So we have spent a lot of time converting between 90 and 95% of our employees to part-time, so the mandate would not apply to them. I have gotten a lot of grief for my heartlessness on this in the comments, but I have zero idea what else I could have done short of simply shutting down the business.
Yesterday I was in an information session about the employer mandate and saw that the other shoe had dropped for companies -- the reporting requirement. Despite the fact that the employer mandate was supposed to kick in almost 9 months ago, until recently the government had still not released the reporting requirements for companies vis a vis the mandate. Well, apparently the draft reporting requirements was released a few weeks ago. I may be missing something, but the key requirement for companies like mine is that every employee must receive a new form in January called an IRS 1095-C, which is parallel to the W-2 we all get to report income.
I know that many of you have probably been puzzled as to what some of those boxes mean on the W-2. Well, you are going to love the 1095C
Everyone is scratching their heads, wondering what this means. For someone like me who has seasonal and part time workers, this form is a nightmare, and I have no idea how we are going to do this. Just to give you a flavor, here are the code choices for line 14:
1A. Qualified Offer: Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to full-time
employee with employee contribution for self-only coverage equal to or less than 9.5% mainland
single federal poverty line and Minimum Essential Coverage offered to spouse and
dependent(s).1B. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee only.
1C. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee and at least Minimum Essential Coverage offered to dependent(s) (not spouse).
1D. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee and at least Minimum Essential Coverage offered to spouse (not dependent(s)).
1E. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee and at least Minimum Essential Coverage offered to dependent(s) and spouse.
1F. Minimum Essential Coverage not providing Minimum Value offered to employee, or employee and spouse or dependent(s), or employee, spouse and dependents.
1G. Offer of coverage to employee who was not a full-time employee for any month of the calendar year and who enrolled in self-insured coverage for one or more months of the calendar year.
1H. No offer of coverage (employee not offered any health coverage or employee offered coverage not providing Minimum Essential Coverage).
1I. Qualified Offer Transition Relief 2015: Employee (and spouse or dependents) received no offer of coverage, or received an offer of coverage that is not a Qualified Offer, or received a Qualified Offer for less than all 12 Months.
Completing lines 14-16 will require an integration of our payroll provider with our health insurance information that I have no idea how we are going to pull off.
Kevin R:
Don't worry! Bank of Sweden Prize winner Paul Krugman says there are no problems with Obamacare and everyone loves it!
August 20, 2014, 9:11 amfrankensteingovernment:
Wow. It never ends with these a##holes. I am not buying Obamacare and I am not paying the penalty. That's a fact.
Read this Federal Statute. To my knowledge- this is not a hoax. However Snopes said it only applies to employers.
This is how Cornell University Law School’s website describes 42 USC § 18115:
No individual, company, business, nonprofit entity, or health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall be required to participate in any Federal health insurance program created under this Act(or any amendments made by this Act), or in any Federal health insurance program expanded by this Act (or any such amendments), and there shall be no penalty or fine imposed upon any such issuer for choosing not to participate in such programs.
The website further explains that the Act referred to in 42 USC § 18115 is Obamacare:
This Act, referred to in text, is Pub. L. 111–148, Mar. 23, 2010, 124 Stat. 119, known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. For complete classification of this Act to the Code, see Short Title note set out under section 18001 of this title and Tables.
From Snopes. They say you cannot opt out of Obamacare. I think you can.
The claim that this section of the law allows individuals to "opt out" of the Obamacare health insurance mandate is erroneous, however; a typical case of people viewing information out of context, misunderstanding it, and mistakenly construing to mean what they want it to say. As this section of the law clearly states, it applies to issuers of group or individual health insurance coverage, not purchasers of health insurance coverage. What this law says is that no one who provides health insurance may be forced to participate in any federal health insurance program (e.g., they don't have to offer or sell coverage through government-created health insurance exchange marketplaces) or be penalized for declining to do so.
The individual health insurance mandate is one of keystones of the Affordable Care Act's implementation. If it were truly optional rather than a requirement, then that fact would long since have been thoroughly publicized to the point of being common knowledge. It wouldn't be an obscure nugget of information hidden in the depths of the U.S. Code, revealed only through unreliable conspiracy web sites and social media posts. (Ya know like the Federal Reserve is a government owned bank, with several dusty trillion laying around)
August 20, 2014, 9:19 amRead more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/optout.asp#5u06FIt6BYu8jgqk.99
mogden:
There are just a few rich people who were negatively affected, but who cares about them? They probably kicked a few poor people before breakfast.
August 20, 2014, 9:30 amVypuero:
I think they are right, though:
[No individual, company, business, nonprofit entity, or health insurance issuer] - is the subject(s)
verb/action = offering group or individual health insurance coverage
so you must be an entity that OFFERS such coverage
August 20, 2014, 9:42 amJohn O.:
Their reading and understanding is correct reguarding 42 USC § 18115. It says so in the first 20 words, anybody who is offering group or individual health insurance is not required to participate in any Federal health insurance program created under the Act or its amendments.
August 20, 2014, 10:07 am