Wednesday, November 28, 2012

NEW HEALTH REFORM FEES COMING!!??

More fees are coming to pay for health reform AKA Affordable Care Act.  Listed below are fees that are in place or going to be in place soon to pay, in some part, the cost of health reform.

  1. Patient Centered Outcomes Research Fee (PCORI) Fee: (This fee is also known as the comparative effectiveness fee.  Most understand this to be where doctors tell us if the procedure we need is cost effective.  The fee is $1 per member per year in 2012 then moved to $2 per member per year the second and then will be adjusted each year until 2019 when its supposed to dissolve.  Which seems unlikely.)
  2. Transitional Reinsurance Fee: (Fees collected from Health Issuers and Third Party Administrators to distribute funds to carriers with non-grandfathered plans that attract individual at risk for high medical costs).  Again, penalize the people who try to maintain a healthy lifestyle.  In effect from 2014-2016
  3. Insurer Fee:  Goes into effect in 2014 and is permanent. (This fee funds premium tax subsidies for individual and families with household incomes between 100 and 400 percent of Federal Poverty Level who purchase health insurance through the exchanges.) This fee will be approximately 2.3% of premium the first year.  
In total you can expect your premium to increase approximately 3.8% in 2014 just because of the above fees.  This isn't the end though.  I am sure there are more to follow once they have been dug out of this law.