3 Bills Congress Could Punt On This Week, for Agents

U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. October 9, 2016.

The U.S. House could bring up H.R. 6757, the Family Savings Act bill, and H.R. 6760, the Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act bill, to the floor this week.

Both bills are full of provisions that could do interesting things for, or to, agent's and broker's clients.

The House could also vote on H.R. 3798, the "Save American Workers Act of 2017″ bill. That bill is full of provisions related to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) employer mandate.

But analysts at Lockton Companies, a Kansas City, Missouri-based benefits firm, say it's unlikely that anything in those three bills will become law before the November midterm elections.

Retirement-related provisions in H.R. 6757 and H.R. 6760 could do things like helping employers join together to form multi-employer retirement plans.

Provisions in those bills, or popular proposals for amendments, could also do things like:

Encouraging employers add annuitization options to 401(k) plans.
Creating a new universal savings account program, to encourage consumers to build up emergency savings.
Easing the current required minimum distribution rules for retirement plan users.

The retirement provisions themselves have support from both Republicans and Democrats, in both the House and the Senate, but, for those provisions, the problem is the neighbors.

"The chance of passage dramatically decreases when the proposals are combined with broader tax relief provisions like a reduction in the corporate rate or permanent individual rate cuts," the Lockton analysts write.

H.R. 3798, which would have eased ACA employer mandate notice requirements and pushed back the start date of the long-postponed ACA "Cadillac plan" tax, looked just 10 days ago as if it was sailing to the House floor.

Then Hurricane Florence struck the North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia and led to the postponement of many items on the House agenda.

"Now it appears that the package has been completely dropped from the House's agenda," the Lockton analysts note.

— Read House Agrees to Debate ACA Employer Mandate Bill Next Week, on ThinkAdvisor.

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