Medicaid Program; Preserving Medicaid Funding for Vulnerable Populations—Closing a Health Care-Related Tax Loophole

This final rule addresses a loophole in a regulatory statistical test applied to State proposals for Medicaid tax waivers. The test is designed to ensure, as required by statute, that non- uniform or non-broad-based health care-related taxes, authorized under a waiver, are generally redistributive. The inadvertent loophole currently allows some health care-related taxes, especially taxes on managed care organizations, to be imposed at higher tax rates on Medicaid taxable units than non-Medicaid taxable units, contrary to statutory and regulatory intent for health care-related taxes to be generally redistributive. The final rule closes the loophole by finalizing the policies in the proposed rule to add additional safeguards to ensure that tax waivers that exploit the loophole because they pass the current statistical test, but are not generally redistributive, are not approvable. By adding these safeguards, the final rule is also implementing recently added statutory requirements for a tax to be considered generally redistributive.