Читать книгу Small Business Taxes For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 67

In March 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act. Together, these two laws enacted comprehensive healthcare reform in the United States. This mammoth legislation comprised thousands of pages of rules and regulations. This section highlights the most important portions of the legislation that you need to understand.

Now, employer group health plans (with 50 or more full-time employees) are subject to these rules:

 Plans offering dependent coverage must offer coverage to adult children up to age 26. The coverage isn’t taxable to the employee or dependent.

 Plans must provide preventive care without cost-sharing and must cover certain child preventive care services as recommended by the government. This rule applies only to new group health plans.

 Employers must offer minimum essential coverage to full-time employees or make nondeductible payments to the government.

 Plans must remove all annual dollar limits on participants’ benefit payments. They may not impose lifetime limits.

 Plans must limit cost-sharing and deductibles to levels that don’t exceed those applicable to a health-savings-account-eligible, high-deductible health plan.

 Plans must remove all preexisting-condition exclusions on all participants.

 Plans may not have waiting periods of longer than 90 days.

Higher income taxpayers are now hit with higher tax rates on their investments as well as higher Medicare tax rates to help pay for Obamacare. Taxpayers with total taxable income above $200,000 (for a single return) or $250,000 (for a joint return) from any source are subject to a 3.8 percent tax on the lesser of the following:

 Their net investment income (for example, interest, dividends, and capital gains)

 The amount, if any, by which their modified adjusted gross income exceeds the dollar thresholds

Taxpayers with earned income above $200,000 (for a single return) or $250,000 (for a joint return) are subject to an additional 0.9 percent Medicare tax (in other words, rising from 1.45 percent to 2.35 percent) on wages in excess of those amounts. Employers aren’t required to match the payment of this incremental increase, which is applicable only to the employee.