FSA Friday - 1/26/18 - How the Cadillac Tax affects your healthcare

While this week's news centered around the government shutdown, the deal that ended it had an unexpected wrinkle that will affect consumer healthcare for the foreseeable future.

On Monday, President Trump signed a bill to fund the government for another three weeks. In this bill was a provision to delay the effective date of a targeted tax on high-cost, employer-sponsored health plans (the "Cadillac Tax") until 2022.

What's a "Cadillac" Tax?

Let's back up a bit. The Cadillac Tax was an attempt by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to solve a tax subsidy issue that dates back to World War II called Employer Sponsored Insurance (ESI). The point of the Cadillac Tax was to address the impact of ESI, raise additional revenue to fund the Affordable Care Act, and encourage employers to go for more cost-effective healthcare options.

According to Forbes, ESI is a tax subsidy that was a result of wage freezes that took place during WWII, and ESI was a means for employers to use tax-free funds to cover the cost of generous health plans. However, as wages grew and ESI remained in place, this created long-term issues for the American healthcare system.

First, ESI only benefits those enrolled in employer-sponsored healthcare coverage, which accounts for about half of all Americans.

Furthermore, the ESI makes it cost-effective for employers to move more money into healthcare benefits rather than wage increases. In terms of compensation, it became cheaper for employers to provide additional healthcare benefits, as opposed to more pay.

So, the Cadillac Tax was created as a deterrent for employers who offer high-cost health plans, with the idea that more money would be available to cover uninsured individuals. This would make the most expensive plans - which some argued would lead to overuse/abuse of medical care benefits - to be less desirable to employers.

The ACA proposed an additional tax on high-cost health plans -- the "Cadillacs" of their industry. This tax adds 40% additional tax on the value of health insurance coverage they offer. This is determined by these thresholds: $10,200 for individual plans and $27,500 for families. In other words, this is the total cost of the healthcare plans, including vision and dental benefits.

The tax, which applies to health plans including FSAs, HSAs and HRAs, was originally set to begin in 2018 and had been delayed until 2022.

Why is the Cadillac Tax delayed?

While the Cadillac Tax seemed like a good idea on paper, Congress failed to implement the tax several times since the ACA passed. The main issue is that this tax is tied to general inflation -- which simply refers to the price of goods and services in an economy over time -- as opposed to medical inflation, which is roughly 2-3x lower.

Healthcare spending typically outpaces general inflation, so this could inevitably lead to a larger amount of healthcare plans being subject to the Cadillac Tax. Because of this, employers are already faced with tough decisions about whether to continue to provide the same standard of healthcare coverage, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Modern Healthcare reports that US employers have begun to implement healthcare changes if the Cadillac Tax ever goes into effect. A shift to high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) has been a leading trend with about 24% of workers in employer plans enrolled in a high-deductible option.

HDHPs are the only types of plans that are offer a health savings account (HSA) option, which could be contributing factor to their explosive growth. HSA enrollment has surged in 2017 to 21 million total accounts, a 16% increase year-over-year, according to research firm Devenir.

The Cadillac Tax has been a major sticking point in the world of consumer healthcare for years, and while it could see legislative changes in the future, this debate will most likely have to wait until its new implementation date in 2022.

If you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, you can read the full text of the bill to get a better idea of what it entails.

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