Does Your Employer Need to Know Your Family Income? Yes!
This is Diana Furchtgott-Roth, writing at RealClearMarkets.com:
Under the new law, health insurance premiums charged by employers to employees must not exceed 9.5% of their household income. As many as 38% of employers may be at risk of violating the unaffordable coverage provision, [a Mercer] study concluded…
Mercer partner Tracy Watts said, “Lawmakers did not take into account that employers don’t have access to information on employee household income. Employers question how they are going to get that information and…what happens if an employee’s total family income changes during the course of a plan year?”
This is really incredible. The more we learn about ObamaCare the more obvious it is that nobody knew what was in it before they voted on it.
Amazing.
The IRS and US DHHS have four years to create new forms for you to report your spouse’s and children’s income to your employer, and vice versa. Intermediaries (Health Insurance Exchange Navigators?) will sell employers their services to figure this out.
For example, if I work for IBM, my wife works for the University of California, and my son lives at home but earns some consulting income, all the payers will have to be able to add this all up and cross check.
And if my son gets a job at Google in June and moves out in September? And if my wife gets a raise in April and I get fired in October?
All these things have to be reported and toted up between all these parties and reported to ObamaCare.
Somebody (Mercer? Towers Watson?) will make a heck of a lot of money supplying the “benefit” to overcome this friction. And it won’t improve one person’s health care.
Won’t workers will have an incentive to under-report their family income to get a bigger subsidy?
What an amazing amount of paperwork created for no useful purpose whatsoever.
I have to tell my employer what my wife makes? This is rediculous.