According to a new report, the latest ObamaCare delay is coming down the pipe, only this one doesn’t fit with the president’s inequality message, which prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than those being offered to regular employees.
According to The New York Times, tax officials said they would not enforce the provision prohibiting employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than regular employers in 2014, because they claim they haven’t issued the regulations yet.
The latest ObamaCare delay pushes off the requirement that says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate “in favor of highly compensated individuals” on either eligibility or benefits, offers a tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, and prohibits employers from providing better coverage to higher-paid employees.
However, much to the contrary of the “fairness” doctrine, Bruce I. Friedland, a spokesman for the IRS, told the New York Times that employers would not have to comply until 2015, after the midterm elections.
Without the ObamaCare delay an employer that offers full health plans that discriminate against regular employees and favor high-paid executives, would be subject to a tax of $100 per day per each individual discriminated against.
The IRS claims the regulations are being held up, because they haven’t decided how to qualify the value of employee health benefits, how to define “highly compensated” and discrimination against regular employees.
Ironically, officials have made the decision to review the existing nondiscrimination rules for self-insured companies, which may not even be changed.
“Under the Affordable Care Act, for the first time all group health plans will be prohibited from offering coverage only to their highest paid employees. The Departments of HHS, Labor and the Treasury are working on rules that will implement this requirement of the ACA, taking into account public comments that were previously requested,” Erin Donar, a spokesperson for the Treasury said in a statement Saturday evening.
“As we continue this work, employers still have the same incentives they always have had to offer coverage to their employees as part of a competitive compensation package, and will have additional incentives under the Affordable Care Act starting this year and next.”
The latest ObamaCare delay is the last in a long list of deadline extensions, exemptions and delays to the deeply unpopular health care law by the Obama administration, which is suspiciously timed to avoid negative coverage in this year’s midterm election cycle.
