Cadillac Tax May Finally Be Running Out of Gas

The Cadillac tax - a 40 percent tax on the most generous employer-provided health insurance plans - may be about to change. The Cadillac tax was supposed to take effect in 2018 but has been delayed twice and recently, the House voted to repeal this tax entirely. Read this blog post to learn more about this potential change.


The politics of healthcare are changing. And one of the most controversial parts of the Affordable Care Act — the so-called Cadillac tax — may be about to change with it.

The Cadillac tax is a 40% tax on the most generous employer-provided health insurance plans — those that cost more than $11,200 for an individual policy or $30,150 for family coverage. It was supposed to take effect in 2018, but Congress has delayed it twice. And the House recently voted overwhelmingly — 419-6 — to repeal it entirely. A Senate companion bill has 61 co-sponsors — more than enough to ensure passage.

The tax was always an unpopular and controversial part of the 2010 health law because the expectation was that employers would cut benefits to avoid paying the tax. But ACA backers said it was necessary to help pay for the law’s nearly $1 trillion cost and help stem the use of what was seen as potentially unnecessary care. In the ensuing years, however, public opinion has shifted decisively, as premiums and out-of-pocket costs have soared. Now the biggest health issue is not how much the nation is spending on healthcare, but how much individuals are.

“Voters deeply care about healthcare still,” said Heather Meade, a spokeswoman for the Alliance to Fight the 40, a coalition of business, labor and patient advocacy groups urging repeal of the Cadillac tax. “But it is about their own personal cost and their ability to afford healthcare.”

Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at Families USA, recently wrote in the journal Health Affairs that the backers of the ACA thought the tax was necessary to sell the law to people concerned about its price tag and to cut back on overly generous benefits that could drive up health costs. But transitions in healthcare, such as the increasing use of high-deductible plans, make that argument less compelling, he said.

“Nowadays, few observers would argue that [employer-sponsored insurance] gives most workers and their families’ excessive coverage,” he wrote.

The possibility of the tax has been “casting a statutory shadow over 180 million Americans’ health plans, which we know, from HR administrators and employee reps in real life, has added pressure to shift coverage into higher-deductible plans, which falls on the backs of working Americans,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.).

Support or opposition to the Cadillac tax has never broken down cleanly along party lines. For example, economists from across the ideological spectrum supported its inclusion in the ACA, and many continue to endorse it.

“If people have insurance that pays for too much, they don’t have enough skin in the game. They may be too quick to seek professional medical care. They may too easily accede when physicians recommend superfluous tests and treatments,” wrote N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics adviser in the George W. Bush administration, and Lawrence Summers, an economic aide to President Barack Obama, in a 2015 column. “Such behavior can drive national health spending beyond what is necessary and desirable.”

At the same time, however, the tax has been bitterly opposed by organized labor, a key constituency for Democrats. “Many unions have been unable to bargain for higher wages, but they have been taking more generous health benefits instead for years,” said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who studies health and public opinion.

Now, unions say, those benefits are disappearing, with premiums, deductibles and other cost sharing rising as employers scramble to stay under the threshold for the impending tax. “Employers are using the tax as justification to shift more costs to employees, raising costs for workers and their families,” said a letter to members of Congress from the Service Employees International Union.

Deductibles have been rising for a number of reasons, the possibility of the tax among them. According to a 2018 survey by the federal government’s National Center for Health Statistics, nearly half of Americans under age 65 (47%) had high-deductible health plans. Those are plans that have deductibles of at least $1,350 for individual coverage or $2,700 for family coverage.

It’s not yet clear if the Senate will take up the House-passed bill, or one like it.

The senators leading the charge in that chamber — Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) — have already written to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to urge him to bring the bill to the floor following the House’s overwhelming vote.

“At a time when healthcare expenses continue to go up, and Congress remains divided on many issues, the repeal of the Cadillac tax is something that has true bipartisan support,” the letter said.

Still, there is opposition. A letter to the Senate on July 29 from economists and other health experts argued that the tax “will help curtail the growth of private health insurance premiums by encouraging employers to limit the costs of plans to the tax-free amount.” The letter also pointed out that repealing the tax “would add directly to the federal budget deficit, an estimated $197 billion over the next decade, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.”

Still, if McConnell does bring the bill up, there is little doubt it would pass, despite support for the tax from economists and budget watchdogs.

“When employers and employees agree in lockstep that they hate it, there are not enough economists out there to outvote them,” said former Senate GOP aide Rodney Whitlock, now a healthcare consultant.

Harvard professor Blendon agrees. “Voters are saying, ‘We want you to lower our health costs,’” he said. The Cadillac tax, at least for those affected by it, would do the opposite.

SOURCE: Rovner, J. ( 19 August, 2019) "Cadillac tax may finally be running out of gas" (Web Blog Post). Retrieved from https://www.employeebenefitadviser.com/articles/obamacare-excise-tax-may-be-at-an-end


The Cadillac Creep Will Impact Your Econo-Health Plan

How will the Cadillac tax affect you in the near future? From SHRM, get the details in this article.


As an HR Professional in 2010, I recall thinking, as I struggled to wrap my mind around the myriad of complex provisions included in the ACA, that the Cadillac tax was probably one provision that I didn’t need to concern myself with. After all, it was years in the future and only applied to those other, richer plans, right? Time for a fast forward reality-check.

The Cadillac tax has been delayed in the past but is set to begin in 2022 on high-cost employer-sponsored health coverage. It will tax health coverage that exceeds $10,200 for individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage at the rate of 40%. This includes contributions made by employers and employees toward health coverage premiums but not cost-sharing amounts such as deductibles, coinsurance or co-payments made when care is delivered.

But, employers, like mine, have certainly not been idle during the last eight years. We have continued to work to design health care plans that will attract and retain top talent while ensuring that coverage meets minimum value and affordability requirements mandated by the ACA. All the while, health care costs, particularly driven by prescription drug costs, continue to climb. Studies suggest that prescription drugs will continue to represent a larger portion of the overall health spending. I have seen this firsthand with the employer-sponsored plans I manage where prescription drug costs may represent over 30% of total health claims spent.

This leaves employers with some tough decisions to either reduce the benefits they offer to maintain a cost-effective plan that still meets minimum coverage and affordability standards or absorb additional costs.  And then, there’s the Cadillac creep. A monthly individual premium of $10,200 annually or $850 per month no longer seems far-fetched as I stare into a future where drug cost inflation rates outpace wage increases.

I’m a proud member of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which encourages Congress to fully repeal the excise tax. I support and join in SHRM’s advocacy efforts to defeat this tax because over 178 million Americans get their health care through employer-sponsored health plans. We can’t afford to let the Cadillac creep impact employers and employees.

This article was written by Crystal Frey of SHRM Blog on April 20th, 2018.