A rule requiring that companies offer the same insurance benefits to their top executives as they do their employees has been put on hold because the IRS can’t figure out how to define concepts like “benefits” and “compensation.”
The rule was scheduled to go into effect in 2010, but was delayed because the IRS couldn’t deal with the complexity of corporate executive compensation. As it turns out, a “one-size-fits-all” regulation is, at this point, an impossibility.
The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate “in favor of highly compensated individuals” with respect to either eligibility or benefits, and provides a tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, while demanding employers not provide better coverage to higher-paid employees.
Yet Bruce I. Friedland, a spokesman for the I.R.S., told the New York Times that employers would not have to comply until the agency issued regulations or other guidance.
Under ObamaCare, an employer that has a fully insured health plan that discriminates in favor of high-paid executives could face a steep penalty: a tax of $100 a day for each individual affected negatively.
Among the issues holding up the implementation of regulations, according to the Times, are how to measure the value of employee health benefits, how to define “highly compensated” and what exactly constitutes discrimination against less-paid employees.
As a result, the Times reports, officials have decided to review the existing nondiscrimination rules for self-insured companies, even as they try to write new rules for employers that buy commercial health insurance.
“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 told Fox News 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 enforcement delay is the latest in a list of deadline extensions and exemptions to the controversial law by the Obama administration to minimize disruption from the new health care law, which is sure to play in key role in this year’s midterm elections.
They’ve had three years to get this right and haven’t even defined the terms necessary for the regulation? They had three years to construct a website and didn’t come close to finishing? What is it with these guys? They’re like college kids who procrastinate on that big paper and then wait until the night before it’s due to start it.
It’s not just aspects of Obamacare where this is evident. How about the late budgets? Other executive branch reports have also been delayed.
The House Budget Committee compiled a list last year:
The President’s flagrant disrespect for budget deadlines extends beyond the late submissions of his annual budget request. The President is required to submit a Midsession Review no later than July 16 each year. The President is required to submit a Financial Report of the U.S. Government no later than December 15. The President is required to submit a plan to shore up Medicare’s finances within 15 days of a funding warning by the Medicare Trustees.
Not once has President Obama adhered to any of these deadlines:
The President’s Midsession Review has never been released by July 16;
The President’s Financial Report of the U.S. Government has never been released by December 15;
The President has not once responded to the Medicare Trigger.
The President’s failures to meet his legal obligations are symptomatic of a failure to meet his more critical moral obligation to the American people by tackling our most pressing fiscal and economic challenges
In all cases, there is a statutory requirement that the documents be delivered to Congress by a date certain. Missing the deadline is violating the law.
But rules and laws are apparently only for the little people. This latest example of presidential incompetence and mismanagement only reinforces the notion that President Obama does not believe the law binds him to a certain course of action and that he can flout the rules whenever it is too inconvenient to follow them.
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