Will Health Care Reform Mean Taxes on FEHBP Plans?

During the health care reform debate in the house, lawmakers, including a number of those who represent districts heavy with federal employees, managed to defeat a funding provision that would have levied a tax on providers of high-cost health plans. Though the taxes were intended to apply to the providers of those plans, opponents argued that companies would simply pass the taxes back down to consumers. And federal employee advocates argued that the high-cost (for ostensibly high-quality coverage) of Federal Employees Health Benefits Program plans meant that federal employees would be some of the first workers in the country hit with the excise tax. The Senate restored the tax, but set a slightly higher threshhold for the cost at which the tax would kick in, $8,500 for plans purchased by individuals to cover themselves, and $23,000 for plans that covered workers and their families, as opposed to $8,000 for individuals and $21,000 for families in the original Senate proposal.

Now, my beat partner and sometimes FedBlog contributor Alex Parker reports that President Obama has begun affirmatively advocating for the excise tax to be included in the final version of the legislation the House and Senate will have to approve. I'll be curious to see if any lawmakers, especially Jim Moran and Gerry Connolly, Democrats who spearheaded the original opposition to the excise tax in the name of federal employees, actually vote against the legislation if it does, as seems likely, have this mechanism. There are a lot of sacred cows in the health care debate, from Bart Stupak's opposition to abortion funding to this. And it'll be down to the wire to see how those cows are treated, and how people react to the changes in the final bill.