Last year, Congress extended the obligation that the ACA imposed on insured and self-funded health plans to fund the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) with an annual fee for an additional ten years. The PCORI fee is calculated by multiplying covered lives by a dollar amount assigned to plan years that begin during a particular federal government fiscal year.
On June 8, the IRS released Notice 2020-44, which increased the applicable dollar amount used to calculate the PCORI fee for the current fiscal year by nine cents, to $2.54. The notice also includes transitional relief for those plan sponsors and insurers who stopped calculating covered lives in the reasonable expectation that the PCORI fee obligation had expired.