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When preparing to comply with the new Healthcare Reform law, large employers should recognize the implications of non-compliance as it relates to the play or pay penalty. If your organization has over fifty full-time employees and they were there in the preceding year, you must offer an adequate health care insurance option to them or pay penalties. What does this mean? It means that if you are a large corporation, your penalties will be assessed based on the recorded number of full-time employees. The pay or play penalty can be calculated in a variety of ways. If you have a number of subsidiaries, your calculations would be different than that of a company with just one major corporation and all of the full-time employees working under that entity. This penalty applies to the corporation or entity that failed to provide “affordable” coverage, which is the main stipulation of the law.

One of the upcoming changes included in the healthcare reform bill is what is known as the Play or Pay penalty. It’s aimed at larger businesses with a certain amount of employees, and it is not exactly straightforward. An employer can offer health insurance , but, it must be “affordable”.  The idea behind the penalty is to offset the cost of insurance for each employee that uses the public health care plans. The specifics for the Play or Pay penalty are as follows: An employer that has 50 full-time or full-time equivalent employees (IE 100 part-time employees) must offer what is known as “affordable” coverage to all qualifying employees. When an employer does not offer health insurance to all employees, an annual tax of $2,000 for each full-time employee if one employee gets federally-subsidized coverage. In the case an employer does not offer “affordable”  coverage to full-time employees, and one employee