Insurance fee in health care law

WASHINGTON -- Your medical plan is facing an unexpected expense, so you probably are, too. It's a new, $63-per-head fee to cushion the cost of covering people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers.

Employee benefits lawyer Chantel Sheaks calls it a "sleeper issue" with significant financial consequences, particularly for large employers.

"[Companies will] be hit with a multimillion-dollar assessment without getting anything back for it," said Sheaks, a principal at Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary.

Employer and individual health plans covering an estimated 190 million Americans could owe the per-person fee.

The administration says it is a temporary assessment designed to raise $25 billion, starting in 2014 and levied for three years. It starts at $63 and declines. Most of the money will go into a fund administered by the Health and Human Services Department and will be used to cushion health insurance companies from the initial hard-to-predict costs of covering uninsured people with medical problems. Insurers will be forbidden to turn away the sick as of Jan. 1, 2014.

The $25 billion fee is part of a package of taxes and fees to finance expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It all comes to about $700 billion over 10 years, and includes higher Medicare taxes effective this Jan. 1 on individuals making more than $200,000 per year or couples making more than $250,000. People above those threshold amounts face an additional 3.8 percent tax on their investment income.