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5500 Preparer's Manual for 2012 Plan Years
The premier resource in the field of Form 5500 preparation, 5500 Preparer's Manual will help you handle the required annual Form 5500 filings for both pension benefits and welfare benefit plans.
From Spencer's Benefits Reports: Since Massachusetts enacted the Health Care Reform Act in 2006, the debate surrounding health care reform has centered on the pros and cons of adding an individual mandate at the federal level. According to a recently-released paper from the Urban Institute entitled, Do Individual Mandates Matter?, an individual mandate is absolutely necessary to provide health care coverage for every American citizen. However, in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation Webcast, Ask the Experts: Individual Mandates, three health care policy experts expressed concerns about how an individual mandate would be designed and implemented with regard to affordability of the mandate and how it would be enforced.
The Urban Institute argues that in a purely voluntary system, many individuals will choose to not obtain coverage. While Massachusetts was weighing its options, the Urban Institute found that any health care reform law without an individual mandate would only cover 40% of the uninsured, leaving 60% of the current uninsured still without coverage. Some opponents of an individual mandate think that health care reform should center on income-related subsidies and providing the uninsured with more opportunities to purchase affordable coverage. However, these measures will fail to provide universal coverage, according to the Urban Institute, because even if they reach two-thirds of the 47 million uninsured in the U.S., 15.5 million people still will lack health care coverage.
If an individual mandate is enacted, a major concern is that some individuals would be required to purchase insurance that they cannot afford. The Urban Institute believes that an individual mandate would only be morally and politically acceptable if required premiums do not exceed an individual’s or family’s ability to pay. However, there is no set standard on which to judge this. According to Len Nichols, director of the health policy program for the New America Foundation, there would have to be a minimum level of benefits mandated in implementing an individual mandate. “However, the tradeoff you face, which is fairly severe, is the more generous you are in demanding that the package cover XYZ, the greater your subsidy costs are going to have to be and the higher up the income scale you are going to have to subsidize people to make it truly affordable,” he stated.
If the coverage mandated is not affordable to all, then people will not enroll in the coverage. In Massachusetts, “a number of residents have been exempted from the mandate because those people can’t afford it and because the state is not willing to cough up the money necessary to give them the subsidies that would allow them to afford it,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies for the Cato Institute.
Enforcing the mandate is another concern for individual mandates. The Urban Institute believes that the most important step in enforcing an individual mandate is to make it easy for people to comply with it and to enroll in qualifying insurance coverage. According to Sherry Glied, professor and chair of the department of health policy and management for Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, “It’s really important that people think that there’s a high probability that they will be caught, which means the enforcement mechanism has to be very systematic, very regular, very routine. It’s not a question of making the penalties enormous; if we make the penalties enormous, they will never be enforced. The penalties have to be proportionate, but people have to believe that if they don’t buy coverage then within a certain amount of time, someone’s going to catch up with them.”
For more information, visit http://www.urban.org or http://www.kff.org.
For more information on this and related topics, consult the CCH Pension Plan Guide, CCH Employee Benefits Management, and Spencer's Benefits Reports.
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