Month: February 2009

From this Full Summary of Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009:

Premium Subsidies for COBRA Continuation Coverage for Unemployed Workers. Recession-related job loss threatens health coverage for many families. To help people maintain coverage, the bill provides a 65% subsidy for COBRA continuation premiums for up to 9 months for workers who have been involuntarily terminated, and for their families. This subsidy also applies to health care continuation coverage if required by states for small employers. With COBRA premiums averaging more than $1000 a month, this assistance is vitally important. To qualify for premium assistance, a worker must be involuntarily terminated between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009. The subsidy would terminate upon offer of any new employer-sponsored health care coverage or Medicare eligibility. Workers who were involuntarily terminated between September 1, 2008 and enactment, but failed to initially elect COBRA because it was unaffordable, would be given an additional 60 days to elect COBRA and receive the subsidy. To ensure that this assistance is targeted at workers who are most in need, participants must attest that their same year income will not exceed $125,000 for individuals and $250,000 for families. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that this provision would help 7 million people maintain their health insurance by providing a vital bridge for workers who have been forced out of their jobs in this recession. This provision is estimated to cost $24.7 billion.

From the Heritage Foundation: $3.27 Trillion.

Also, the bill is apparently now 1,434 pages long.

Internal Revenue Service officials have released the final report on its tax-exempt hospital project. The purpose of the project was so that “IRS and other stakeholders could better understand nonprofit hospitals and their community benefit and executive compensation practices and reporting.”

The report is based on the responses to questionnaires the IRS sent to a sample of more than 500 nonprofit hospitals. As part of the study, the IRS also examined 20 nonprofit hospitals regarding their executive compensation practices.

Here is what the report had to say about the IRS’s findings on executive compensation:

In general, the hospitals reported widespread compliance with key indicators of sound compensation practices, including use of formal written compensation policies, use of comparability data, approval in advance by persons without a conflict of interest, and setting compensation within the range of comparability data. This pattern was reported consistently across the community types and revenue size categories, and was confirmed in the examinations of the 20 hospitals.

The American Benefits Council has published a summary of provisions in the Conference Agreement for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Summary indicates what the COBRA provisions contained in the bill will look like:

The COBRA subsidy for eligible workers would be equal to 65% of the COBRA premium for a period of 9 months.

The COBRA subsidy would be administered by Treasury through a mechanism that allows employers to receive a credit against payroll taxes.

Individuals with annual incomes above $125,000 (single) or $250,000 (couples) would not be eligible for the COBRA subsidy.

The website STEWARD which stands for “Stimulate The Economy Without Accumulating Record Debt” has more on the health care controversy stemming from the Senate Stimulus Package here. The website was started by an Obama donor who opposes the Stimulus Bill.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Congress and the White House reached accord on a $789.5 billion economic-recovery package that would shower hundreds of billions of dollars in tax relief on individuals and businesses and spark an infrastructure building boom from the nation’s ports and waterways to its schools and military bases. The deal all but clinches passage of one of the largest economic rescues since Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal. . .

The compromise preserves $1.1 billion for a national “comparative effectiveness” study of health-care practices to try to determine the best treatments, devices and procedures for almost any ailment or disease. That information would then be disseminated to physicians nationally, perhaps on new medical computer systems also being funded.

Advocates of the study, including the president, say it will improve health care in all corners of the country and bring more uniformity to treatments. But conservative opponents have warned that it’s the first step toward a government prescription to doctors of what they can and cannot do for their patients.

From Bloomberg:

Republican Senators are questioning whether President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill contains the right mix of tax breaks and cash infusions to jump-start the economy.

Tragically, no one from either party is objecting to the health provisions slipped in without discussion. . .

By a vote of 61 to 37, the Senate has passed its version of H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Now the Senate’s bill and the version of the bill passed by the House of Representatives on January 28 will have to be reconciled before it can be passed by Congress and become law.

You can watch the debate going on in the Senate over the Stimulus legislation here. A vote is expected this afternoon.

Last week, I attended the Joint Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Pension Liaison Group, the Great Lakes Area TE/GE Council, the Gulf Coast TE/GE Liaison Council, and the Pacific Coast Area TE/GE Council. The joint meeting was held on the campus of the University of Baltimore. Practitioners from all over the country and representatives from the Internal Revenue Service were in attendance and conducted some lively discussion on key issues. While there were presentations on many areas, I would have to say that many of the questions raised by practitioners centered around the impact of the economy on retirement plans. I hope to write about some of the discussions in the next week. . .