Credit: iStock
Most Americans want to keep the federal income tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health benefits in place, and support for keeping the exclusion in place is bipartisan.
The American Benefits Council and America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) make that case in summaries of results for polls the groups recently sponsored.
Recommended For You
President-elect Donald Trump and congressional leaders have not yet discussed any concrete proposals for changing the current health benefits tax rules, but the Republican Study Commission, a group made up of U.S. House Republicans, has proposed providing a capped health insurance premium tax exclusion that would be available for both employers and individuals.
The American Benefits Council’s survey. The American Benefits Council, a group for large employers, addressed the issue by hiring a firm to poll 800 voters on election night by telephone.
About 93 percent of the voters who participated agreed with the statement that “employer-provided health insurance should remain tax-free because it encourages employers to provide high-quality, affordable healthcare coverage,” according to the council. And just 7 percent of the participants agreed with the statement that “employer-provided health insurance should be taxed because it would raise federal revenue and discourage overuse of healthcare services,” the council said.
AHIP‘s survey. America’s Health Insurance Plans, a group for health insurers, commissioned an online survey of about 1,000 Americans with employer-provided health coverage in July.
Only 29 percent of survey participants support the idea of taxing employee health benefits. The percentage favoring taxing health benefits was 34 percent among the Democrats in the sample, 28 percent among the Republicans, and 24 percent among the swing voters. (Some survey participants said they are neutral about the idea of taxing health benefits.)
The proportion of participants who oppose the idea of taxing health benefits was 58 percent among all survey participants, 61 percent for swing voters, 59 percent for Republicans, and 55 percent for Democrats.
About 63 percent of all the AHIP survey participants said they would be less likely to vote for a U.S. House or U.S. Senate candidate who had voted to tax health benefits.
————————————————————
From: BenefitsPRO
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
