Health Care and the Tax Bill: ICYMI

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Trump December 20, 2017, The Wall Street Journal called “the most sweeping changes to the tax code in more than 30 years.” Tax policy is not my expertise, but we do love policy in general at M2, so this blog highlights some of the best pieces we have read so far on what the tax bill may mean for various parts of the health care system.

For a quick, but thoughtful primer, read Paige Winfield Cunningham’s The Health 202: It’s a happy holiday for medical tax breaks, but not Obamacare’s individual mandate. Cunningham gives a snapshot of health care interests including patients, hospitals, health systems, insurers, pharma companies, and academic medical centers.

Over at HealthcareDIVE, Shannon Muchmore provides a bit deeper dive on the bill’s effects across the health care industry. Steven Porter at HealthLeadersMedia also covers some technical provisions important to various industries that you might not have read about.

Brian Bowden blogged for The National Association of Counties before the final bill, but his take is still useful in thinking about how various provisions of the tax bill affect health care delivery at the county level.

As always, an excellent, deep analysis is provided by Health Affairs. Timothy Jost posted The Tax Bill and The Individual Mandate: What Happened, And What Does It Mean? and included this under-reported tidbit: “…the repeal of the individual mandate penalty will not by any means bring an end to the ACA. The numbers who lose coverage will likely be much smaller than the CBO estimates. S&P Global estimates that it is more likely that three to five million will lose coverage by 2027. The Medicaid expansions, which have accounted for a majority of the ACA’s coverage of the uninsured, will continue.”

(The short S&P piece is worth a read too. Click through!)

To close out, if you are dying to know about S Corps and “pass-through” entities, and what that has to do with the health care world, read through this well-rounded piece by Harris Meyer at Modern Healthcare. He covers how hospital systems might restructure employment agreements with providers and whether the new tax cut for small business might address access in rural areas.

We hope you learn something new from reading these pieces – we certainly did. Of course, feel free to let us know about any articles you think shed new light on health care and the tax bill.