'Post' Script : What's Next for Employment-Based Health Benefits?

On December 13, 2012, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) convened its 71st biannual policy forum, which focused on the topic: “'Post' Script: What’s Next for Employment-Based Health Benefits?” This paper summarizes the speakers’ presentations. With the so-called fiscal cliff still looming, and the new Congress not yet in place, a wide range of national experts on U.S. health policy offered the roughly 130 attendees a post-election perspective on fiscal impacts from the federal budget; new findings from the EBRI Center for Research on Health Benefits Innovation; and insights on how employment-based health benefits might evolve between 2014-2018 as a result of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), as well as the budgetary issues confronting the nation, a new Congress, and a returning Obama administration. Speakers noted the following: (1) Recent discussions in Congress to possibly cap or reduce the tax exclusion for health benefits could result in a big shock for workers. (2) A major problem underlying rising healthcare spending is the nation’s rapidly aging population. (3) While health care cost trends made change inevitable, PPACA exacerbated the impact on two key fronts: the administrative difficulties in dealing with health exchanges, and the fees imposed on employers. (4) For small employers, the attraction of having workers get health coverage through a health exchange (rather than their jobs) is going to be very strong. The PDF for the above title, published in the March 2013 issue of EBRI Notes, also contains the fulltext of another March 2013 EBRI Notes article abstracted on SSRN: “A Little Help: The Impact of On-line Calculators and Financial Advisors on Setting Adequate Retirement-Savings Targets: Evidence from the 2013 Retirement Confidence Survey.”