The bill may also cost consumers billions in additional costs levied by health insurers. Remember, the new health care reform laws in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act don’t go in effect until 2014. All insurance applicants and policyholders should order an annual copy of their medical report files from the nationwide specialty nationwide consumer reporting agencies to ensure they aren’t overpaying for insurance or in danger of policy rejection or rescission for pre-existing conditions or errors. (For example, “Denied Insurance Because of a Medical Coding Error in Her MIB Report” from the Consumer Reports Health Blog)

https://www.annualmedicalreport.com/denied-insurance-because-of-a-medical-coding-error-in-her-mib-report-video/

Just as financial companies rely on “credit reports” to establish credit for customers, insurance companies utilize “medical reports” to assess the health, insurability, and price ratings for individual health insurance applicants. The Federal laws that govern the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion also regulate the nationwide specialty insurance reporting agencies the Medical Information Bureau Inc (MIB), Ingenix Inc., and Milliman Inc.

In fact, failing to check your medical report can be costly; errors or omissions within individual medical report files can cause applicants to be rejected outright, pay higher policy premiums, or suffer outright rescission of coverage! All health insurance applicants and policyholders should request an annual copy of their “medical report” files from the three major specialty nationwide consumer reporting agencies to ensure they aren’t overpaying for insurance or in danger of policy rejection or rescission for reported pre-existing conditions.

That is surprising... Anyone ever heard of this organization?

The health insurance lobbying group America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) says the Medical Information Bureau Inc (MIB) is "the insurance industry’s leading provider of information used to detect omissions and material misrepresentations on insurance applications."
http://bit.ly/crIA3H

According to an AHIP press release, "the MIB is a secure, cooperative data exchange formed by the North American insurance industry more than a century ago to detect and deter fraud on applications for medically underwritten insurance. It operates the most extensive database of medical information on individuals who have previously applied for health, life, disability income, critical illness and long-term care insurance in North America."

It's true that these large companies will lose a tax benefit that they have been receiving since 2003 that will cost them hundreds of millions over 30 years (much less annually), but what they did not say, when publicizing the cost in recent weeks, was that the reason for this was that Congress was closing off a huge tax loophole that is nothing less than pure corporate welfare, one of the more inexplicable corporate giveaways in the 2003 prescription drug bill that Bush rammed through Congress.

One of the features of that prescription drug benefit was that, to compensate for the mandate that large companies provide prescription drug benefits to their retirees (many of which were already providing those benefits when tehe 2003 law went into effect), the government agreed to give those companies a 28% subsidy to pay part of the cost of providing the coverage to their retirees (in other words, 28% of the cost of providing those benefits was paid by the government). That subsidy is not treated as income to the recipients. Fair enough. That is not what I mean by corporate welfare. The boondoggle here was that the recipients of this 28% subsidy were allowed to claim on their tax returns that they were paying for 100% of the cost of the benefits paid to retirees, when, in reality, they were only paying 72% of the cost (with the rest being funded by the taxpayers).

Under the new health care reform legislation, those large corporations continue to receive 28% of the cost of the benefit in taxpayer money as a subsidy for the cost of the retiree drug coverage, but they can no longer deduct the portion being paid by the government for tax purposes. In other words, the government closed a huge tax loophole that added to an already sizable 28% subsidy, an additional tax benefit that the public knew nothing about, that owed its existence to all of the lobbyists who had their fingerprints all over the 2003 prescription drug bill. Truly outrageous, and even republicans at the time (the fiscally conservative ones, like Tom Coburn) were very critical of that kind of pork, which that 2003 prescription drug bill was overflowing with.

If that were not enough, accounting rules require these companies to take an earnings charge down for the entire "capitalized cost" of the reduction in tax write-offs in one year, up front -- the year in which the law is passed, even though the cost is absorbed in annual installments -- which is why they are claiming it is costing them this huge amount of money. According to analysts quoted in several articles that I read about this, the reason the accounting reductions being announced are so large is because the companies project out the benefit from the current subsidy for 30 years, using assumptions about the growth of the cost which are based on health care's current very high inflation rate (but presumably reducd to a present value lump sum using a very low discount rate, given low long term interest rates, as they they cram the "loss" back into one fiscal quarter. First quarter profits will be reduced on their financial statements, but there will be no long-term impact on the companies' financial health, or so Wall Street analysts are telling investors (who they are advising not to freak out about this, because its largely a paper loss, and the cost they are claiming as a n immediate loss is in fact spread over 30 years. AT&T's charge-off was reported as a billion dollars, but the actual cost of revoking the subsidy for one year will be $40 million, according to background information provided by the White House.

So, HCR will definitely cost some very large companies a boatload of money (over 30 years, but to be written in full off this year under GAAP accounting). But you know what? Welcome to the same world everybody else lives in. When I get checks from the government, I have toreport it as income on my tax return. When I am investing in a real estate deal, I don't get to include the cost of infrastructure developed as part of a real estate project in my taxable basis for that project to the extent the government is funding the cost of those improvements through a TIF or other government subsidy (even though the government is forcing our joint venture to construct those infrastructure improvements for the good of the community), and with all due respect, I don't think AT&T, Catepillar, Deere and other large companies should ever have received taxpayer largesse of this kind either, not when our government is running at a trillion dollar deficit.

Those are facts -- now I ask you, is it really fair for these companies to be screaming bloody murder about these one-time charge-offs because health care took away from them tax benefits they never should have had in the first place? I didn't think so.

What you are leaving out is that the companies receive this "tax loophole" for providing drug coverage to their seniors. Some wouldn't call that a loophole but an incentive to provide coverage so the government does not have to. Without that tax loophole, the companies probably will stop offering that coverage. This means the seniors will lose their coverage (thanks Obama - what happened to having the same coverage they always had) or the government will now have to pick up the coverage and thus increase the unexpected costs of the health care monstrosity.

MT, welcome to the real world.

ObamaCosts (in Dollars) so far…

Caterpillar: $100 Million
John Deere: $150 Million
AT&T: $1 Billion
3M: $85 to $90 Million
Valero Energy: $15 to $20 Million
AK Steel: $31 Million
Verizon: $500 Million
Prudential: $100 Million
Illinois Tool Works $22 Million
Honeywell: $13 Million
Allegheny Technologies: $5 Million
Goodrich: $10 Million
Verizon: $970 Million
Boeing: $150 Million
Lockheed Martin Corp: $96 Million
Exelon Corp: $65 Million
Eaton Corp: $25 Million
Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc: $20 Million

RUNNING TOTAL: $3,347,000,000

Announced Jobs Cuts (so far):
Medtronic 1,000 (likely)

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Thanks for sharing this very useful information, it def comes in handy!!

Any new updates as of 4/13/2010?

Thanks a bunch!

B.

Ingersoll-Rand (IR) - $41 Million

Wonderful to read!

Im surprised to have found this blog, I though I was the only one writing about this...thanks.

If your child tax credit is zero, you didn’t pay any tax, so your rebate is $300 for yourself and another $300 for your spouse if you filed a joint return, plus $300 for each child under age 17.

In fact I would venture to guess that we need more federal government services like Custer needed more indians...

Instead of worrying about collecting taxes from Amazon and other companies, why don't they worry about collecting taxes from the people that live in N.C. that don't pay their taxes and some of them might be our politicians. Why don't they start taxing the checks for people on welfare and medicaid that have never paid any taxes? If N.C. needs money why don't the politicians forego their raises they give themselves and pay for they own gas that taxpayers pay and that would amount to a good bit of taxpayer money saved.

I’ve been filing online for past 6 years with turbo tax, they guide you through it and then check for possible errors.

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