For Immediate Release
Washington, DC – The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) sent a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives urging lawmakers to vote yes on H.R. 3798, the “Save American Workers Act of 2018.”
The bill, containing provisions which have already been approved by the House Ways and Means Committee, would delay the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) “Cadillac” excise tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health insurance for an additional year, until January 1, 2023. It would also grant relief to employers on employer mandate penalties for the period of January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2018, and provide limited relief related to ACA reporting requirements, among other things.
For more than nine years ERIC has been fighting against the tax, including strongly supporting the two-year delay contained in the Continuing Resolution earlier this year. ERIC first spoke out against the tax during the crafting of the Affordable Care Act in 2009, and since then ERIC staff and member company representatives have spent thousands of hours meeting one-on-one with lawmakers and their staff, publicly called on lawmakers to vote for legislation that would repeal the tax, and written letter, after letter, after letter working towards a delay and then an eventual repeal.
“H.R. 3798 is a step in the right direction to fully repeal the Cadillac tax. As the tax looms closer to implementation, employers will be forced to ready themselves for it. To prepare, they will start scaling back benefits and increasingly shift rising health care costs to employees,” said James Gelfand, Senior Vice President of Health Policy, ERIC. “ERIC will continue to work with lawmakers on this critical issue, including those in the U.S. Senate, where earlier in the 115th Congress, a majority of Senators voted to completely and permanently repeal the Cadillac tax.”
Click here to read ERIC’s letter.