Key takeaways:

• The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act imposes a new tax on employers who sponsor self-insured medical plans and issuers of insurance policies for health plans, for plan years ending on or after October 1, 2012 and before October 1, 2019.
• The tax, intended to finance the efforts of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, is relatively modest in the early years but could increase significantly as the cost of health care rises.
• The Internal Revenue Service recently issued proposed guidance including exceptions for plans and policies that will not be subject to the "Research Institute" tax and rules for calculating the amount of the tax.