The 2010 health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), hits small business with a barrage of inequities. Among the most egregious is the health insurance tax (HIT) launched by the law’s Section 9010. Ostensibly a tax on insurers, its real effect will be hundreds of billions of dollars of taxation on people who purchase coverage in the fully-insured market – mostly small business employers and employees and the self-employed. These are the people who usually generate around two-thirds of America’s new jobs.
In contrast, the HIT bypasses those who have coverage through self-insured plans – mostly big business, labor unions, and governments. Like PPACA’s essential health benefits and longstanding state benefit mandates, the HIT puts an anchor around the neck of small business while leaving larger organizations free to swim unburdened. And the anchor is a heavy one.
Over the first decade, the HIT will hit the fully-insured market with an estimated $87.4 billion tab, but that figure greatly understates the long-run financial impact. The tax is not implemented until the fourth year of the decade (2014) and is only fully implemented in 2018. The tax rises from $8 billion in 2014 to $14.3 billion in 2018 and in later years, even higher according to a complex (and at this point opaque) index, discussed below.
To put this in perspective, that $14.3 billion equals around 15 percent of the total small business expenditures on employee benefits in 2007. According to IRS data, proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations with up to $10 million in annual receipts deducted $96.8 billion that year for Employee Benefit Programs. An extra 15 percent or so constitutes an enormous blow to the ability of small businesses to compete against larger entities.
The HIT’s full magnitude will only become apparent in the second decade (2021-2030), when businesses and consumers experience 10 years of a premium-indexed, fully-implemented HIT. The second-decade cost is difficult to forecast, but may exceed $200 billion or even $300 billion. It all depends on how rapidly the law’s arcane index lifts the HIT beyond its $14.3 billion base in later years. There are two major sources of uncertainty in that index.Continue reading…