Martin Heinrich: “I thank my colleague. Mr. President, the whole policy objective of the Cadillac tax was supposed to cap excessive…”

“I thank my colleague. Mr. President, the whole policy objective of the Cadillac tax was supposed to cap excessive spending as a way to reduce health care spending and to generate revenue for other parts of the ACA. Obviously, the popular name of the tax implies that it is only going to hit a few individuals with gold-plated health insurance plans. When this was proposed and included in the ACA, people cited Goldman Sachs' executive health benefits plans as sort of the poster child for the Cadillac plan. Obviously, they chose very wisely in the way that they branded this. But this tax targets many plans that aren't gold plated; they are barely bronze plated. It solidly taxes middle-class workers. Proponents of the Cadillac tax are operating under the clearly flawed premise that plans with overly generous benefits are the primary drivers of increased health insurance programs, and we know today that is not the case. The data doesn't back it up. According to a 2014 report, the richness of plan benefits accounts only for about 6 percent of the overall increases in a plan's premium growth. The costs of employer health plans are actually driven by factors that are largely out of the control of the actual beneficiary-- things like the group's size, the health status of the firm's employees, or the age band for those employees. Geography alone accounts for 69.3 percent of a plan's premium growth, which obviously would be completely unaffected.…”