For Immediate Release
Washington, DC – The ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) has achieved a major legislative victory, as Congress today finally repealed the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) “Cadillac” excise tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health insurance. ERIC especially wishes to recognize the bipartisan and energetic leadership of Congressmen Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Mike Kelly (R-PA), and Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Mike Rounds (R-SD), without whom this accomplishment for American workers would have been impossible.
For the past decade, ERIC has been fighting against the tax year after year, most recently teaming up with over 1,000 business organizations to call on the U.S. Senate to fully repeal the tax by passing S. 684, the Middle-Class Health Benefits Tax Repeal Act of 2019. Last year, ERIC strongly supported a two-year delay of the damaging tax, which was passed as part of the 2018 Continuing Resolution to fund the government. ERIC first spoke out against the tax during the crafting of the ACA in 2009, and since then ERIC staff and member company representatives have spent thousands of hours meeting one-on-one with lawmakers and their staff, publicly calling on lawmakers to vote for legislation that would repeal the tax, and writing letter, after letter, after letter advocating for delay and repeal of the Cadillac tax.
“America’s large employers, and the tens of millions of Americans with employer-sponsored health coverage, can finally breathe easy, thanks to today’s repeal of the Cadillac tax,” said Annette Guarisco Fildes, President and CEO, ERIC. “The tax was never going to generate massive amounts of money as the budget scorekeepers assumed. Instead, the existence of the tax forced employers to scale back their benefit offerings, and increasingly shift rising health care costs to employees as the only way to avoid the tax. Now, employers will be able focus on the future with certainty, while they continue to champion innovation in the health care system to bring down costs and improve health care quality, in order to provide the high-value benefits employees and their families have come to rely on.”
ERIC wishes to thank those lawmakers who recognized the damage the Cadillac tax would have had on employer-sponsored health care and voted to repeal it before the end of the year.