April 15th, with little fan fare, President Obama signed away the hated 1099 provision within PPACA (or ACA if you prefer) that would have required a business to file a 1099 miscellaneous income reporting form with the IRS for any vendor whenever it had $600 or more in transactions with that vendor in a given tax year.
The bill passed:
The House with members voting 314-112 for H.R. 4 on March 3.
The Senate by a vote of 87-12 on April 5.
You didn't think the Republicans would issue any praise for that did you? I don't know if the 1099 "thing" was a result of Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe holding ACA hostage or who put that provision in. One thing is certain, small business owners are glad it's gone. So is the revenue ($19 billion over 10 years) it was supposed to reap starting in January 2012.
Small business owners had a point, it would have been a lot of paperwork. If they bought new office furniture and a new desktop computer from Office Depot, they would have to issue a 1099 to Office Depot at the end of the year. This bill also repealed the requirement to issue 1099's for renting real estate that would be a nightmare for business travel for small businesses. This provision was focused on small business tax cheats. The small repair shop that comes into another small business and repairs whatever for cash and doesn't report the income to the IRS. It would have made it more difficult for tax cheats to cheat, but in truth; the provision had little to do with health care. Using health care to give the IRS's enforcement division a headache wasn't very bright.
No one is really going to miss the 1099 provision, but we will miss the revenue it was supposed to reap. The problem is that the $19 billion lost in this repeal of the 1099 provision is funded by decreasing the PPACA health insurance subsidy program that is set to start up in 2014.
It's another win for business and a loss for the uninsured, underinsured and working poor.
President Obama signed the measure on April 15th
While signing H.R. 4, President Obama said he is “eager to work with anyone with ideas about how we can make health care better or more affordable."
Mr. President, Sir, I have a suggestion. Let's open up Medicare and Tricare and let anyone enroll in those programs that want to. Bypassing private health insurance will save us up to 30% of our insurance premium dollars.
Mr. President, if you want to make health care more affordable, then we need to take on the perverse incentives of fee for service billing, and create efficacious standards of care to replace our current system that gives too much care to people with "good" insurance and too little care to people with no insurance or "bad" insurance.
And, Mr. President, I also suggest that we stop confusing health insurance with health care. Most of our health care "affordability" problems are due to this confusion.
This repeal wasn't completely ignored as President Obama did get damned with faint praise a little bit of praise.
The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, Falls Church (NAIFA), Va., has issued a statement commending Obama for signing H.R. 4 and noting that NAIFA continues to support repeal of several other PPACA provisions, such as a section providing $2.2 billion for a new system of nonprofit, policyholder-own health insurers and a section that could create a voucher system that would help workers opt out of group health plans and buy individual coverage.
NAIFA also is asking Congress to pass H.R. 1206, a bill that would exclude agent commissions from the new PPACA minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) system.
“The MLR provision is another part of health reform that needs to be revisited in order to preserve consumer service,” NAIFA President Terry Headley says in a statement. “Many agents have seen commissions slashed by 50% or more, and they have had to curtail the customer services their individual and small-group clients have come to expect.”
Ok, I read that as 1 down, 3 to go.
NAIFA is happy the subsidies are nixed (which is counter productive, but consistent with Republican "values"). Now, they want to get rid of the $2.2 billion funded watered down, self-insured Public Option scheduled to start in 2014 and the voucher system that would help people move off group policies and onto individual policies - not that I can see anyone actually doing that and the real target - adjusting the MLR (Medical Loss Ratio) down to 60%. We need to take on that fight. The MLR needs to stay at 80-85%.
Nowhere in NAIFA's statement is there anything about getting rid of the individual mandate to get insurance. They like that part just fine. The Politics of Greed continues.