Healthcare Compliance Inc: February 2018

Tuesday, 13 February 2018

Affordable Care Act Software 2018 | Section 125 – Cafeteria Plans Overview

A Section 125 plan, or a cafeteria plan, allows employees to pay for certain benefits on a pre-tax basis. Specifically, employers use these plans to provide their employees with a choice between cash and certain qualified benefits without adverse tax consequences. Paying for benefits on a pre-tax basis reduces the employees’ taxable income and therefore reduces both the employees’ and the employer’s tax liability.

In order to receive these tax advantages, a cafeteria plan must comply with the rules of Internal Revenue Code (Code) Section 125 and related Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations. Under these rules, a Section 125 plan must have a written plan document and can only offer certain qualified benefits on a tax-favored basis. While self-employed individuals may maintain a Section 125 plan for their employees, only common law employees may participate in the plan.

In addition, once an employee makes a Section 125 plan election, he or she may not change that election until the next plan year, unless the employee experiences a permitted election change event. Also, in order for highly compensated employees to receive the tax advantages associated with a Section 125 plan, the plan must generally pass certain nondiscrimination tests.

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Friday, 9 February 2018

Full Time Employee Tracking for ACA | Republicans Kill Obamacare’s Controversial Death Panel

The Affordable Care Act is working to make health care more affordable, accessible, and of a higher quality for families, seniors, businesses, and taxpayers alike.

Now Congress has killed a part of Obamacare that never even got to live except in the realm of political theater.

After years of GOP bluster about a Medicare cost-cutting tool — known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB — lawmakers quietly erased that deeply controversial part of the Affordable Care Act in a broad federal spending plan that passed both chambers of Congress while we were sleeping last night. The massive budget deal, which hikes military and domestic spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, passed the House at 5:30 a.m., nearly four hours after the Senate cleared the legislation, my colleagues Mike DeBonis and Erica Werner report.

The IPAB is the second part of President Obama’s health-care law this current Congress has kicked out the door, and unlike the individual mandate — recently unwound by the partisan GOP tax overhaul — many Democrats are on board this time around, but mostly because they’re supporting the larger spending framework.

Discussion of the Affordable Care Act often incites fear, confusion, and anger in people both for and against its passage.