President-elect Donald Trump says he wants to disrupt the status quo in Washington.
Adam Beck, a health benefits policy shaper, is hoping the new administration will make the current system more affordable without turning it upside down.
Beck is senior vice president of commercial product and employer policy at America’s Health Insurance Plans, a health insurer trade group.
The current federal health benefits framework has helped keep employer-sponsored health plan enrollment stable for the past 70 years, Beck said Wednesday during a policy forum organized by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
“We do have a system where half of Americans get health coverage that they generally like,” Beck said. “This is not a system that needs to be entirely disrupted.”
Beck said he would like to see administration proposals for supporting telehealth benefits and expanding the health savings account program.
He would not like to see policymakers change the rules that now let employers deduct what they spend on health benefits from their taxable income.
Tracy Watts, U.S. leader for health care policy at Mercer, said her top concern is what will happen when Congress drafts the legislation needed to keep the tax breaks included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 from expiring.
“What will happen with the pay-fors for that?” Watts asked.
Some conservative House Republicans and health policy specialists at think tanks that are popular with Republicans have supported the idea of capping the group health tax exclusion.
But Watts noted that Republicans will have only a narrow majority in the House and that it’s not clear what will really pass.
Garrett Hohimer, a vice president at the Business Group on Health, emphasized the need to look at the data and the facts in a calm way and avoid sensationalism.
“We really want to bring the temperature down,” Hohimer said.
The big picture: Paul Fronstin, EBRI’s health benefits research director, presented data giving a mixed picture of the current state of the benefits market.
The percentage of employers offering health benefits fell to 22.5% in 2023, from 34.2% in 1996, for employers with fewer than 10 employees and to 51.8%, from 64.9%, for employers with 10 to 24 employees, according to an EBRI analysis of federal government data.
But the percentage of employers with 100 or more employees offering health benefits increased slightly, and the percentage of all private-sector workers eligible for health coverage fell only a little — to 78.8%, from 81.3%.
Fronstin also showed that, although the total value of the federal health benefits tax exclusion is $389 billion, the exclusion amounts to just $2,400 per covered employee.
That compares with a tax subsidy value of $6,000 per person for people with individual or family health coverage.