February 7, 2013
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration adopted a strict definition of affordable health insurance on Wednesday that will deny federal financial assistance to millions of Americans with modest incomes who cannot afford family coverage offered by employers.
In deciding whether an employer’s health plan is affordable, theInternal Revenue Service said it would look at the cost of coverage only for an individual employee, not for a family. Family coverage might be prohibitively expensive, but federal subsidies would not be available to help buy insurance for children in the family.
The policy decision came in a final regulation interpreting ambiguous language in the 2010 health care law.
Under the law, most Americans will be required to . . . click to continue.
January 22, 2013
Jerry Geisel
Employers will not face massive penalties mandated by the health care reform law if they do not offer coverage to all their full-time employees, according to newly proposed Internal Revenue Service regulations.
The massive $2,000-per-full-time-employee penalty will not apply so long as employers offer coverage to at least 95% of their full-time employees and their dependents up to age 26, the IRS said.
Those eagerly awaited regulations, which were issued last week, end more than a year and a half of uncertainty involving a health care reform law provision of crucial importance to employers.
$2,000 penalty
Read literally, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act imposes, effective in 2014, a penalty of up to $2,000 per full-time employee on employers with at least 50 employee even if just one full-time employee is not offered coverage, is eligible for a federal premium subsidy, and used the subsidy to buy coverage in a public health insurance exchange.
That prospect alarmed employers. Without regulatory flexibility, Click Here to continue article.
