It should come as no surprise that the Affordable Care Act is still very much a work in progress. Over the course of six years, the ACA has made significant strides in ensuring health care coverage, but with those strides come necessary modifications, and with 2016 well underway, the ACA presents some new ones.
Among these changes include extensions in the deadlines for ACA forms reporting and filings, as well as adjustments in ACA penalties and safe harbor percentages to reflect inflation. In addition, should employers incur difficulties in completing forms, there will be some relief from penalties, as this reporting is new and subject to margins of error.
Another significant change involves the Cadillac Tax, named after the luxury vehicle, which seeks to affect high cost health insurance plans imposed by employers. That tax was slated for 2018, but is now moved to 2020, and per Obama’s Protecting Americans from Takes Hikes Act of 2015 (PATH), should employers pay into the future Cadillac Tax, they will be able to write it off as a business expense.
Finally, before the close of 2015, there was still some ambiguity in the ACA requiring employers with over 200 employees to enforce automatic health care coverage company-wide. That requirement has now been removed, as employees were previously allowed to opt-out of any health care coverage by their employer, but are still required to obtain some coverage from the Marketplace under the ACA. This is clearly an extension of PATH Act, considering employees are able to then determine their most cost effective health insurance, without relying solely on the one offered from their employer.