Obamacare Requires Fire Departments to Pay for Volunteer's Health Insurance

Dec. 05--A local congressman wants answers on whether volunteer firefighting companies could be unintentionally swept into the national health care reform law championed by President Barack Obama.

The International Association of Fire Chiefs has asked the Internal Revenue Service, which has partial oversight of the law, to clarify if current IRS treatment of volunteer firefighters as employees means their hose companies or towns must offer health insurance coverage or pay a penalty if they don't.

The organization representing the fire chiefs has been working on the issue with the IRS and White House for months.

"It could be a huge deal," said U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, R-11, Hazleton, who is seeking clarification from the IRS. "In Pennsylvania, 97 percent of fire departments are fully or mostly volunteer firefighters. It's the fourth highest amount in the country."

So far, the IRS hasn't decided what to do.

Efforts to reach spokesmen for the IRS were unsuccessful.

Under the fire chiefs' organization's interpretation, the concern goes like this:

The health care reform law, known officially as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and derisively by Republicans as Obamacare, requires employers with 50 or more full-time employees to offer health insurance. Companies with fewer than 50 employees do not have to offer insurance. Full-time employees are defined as an employee who works 30 or more hours a week.

Such employers who don't offer health insurance must pay fines.

The requirement is complicated by differing interpretations about the status of volunteer firefighters within the federal government. The Department of Labor, according to the fire chiefs group, classifies most volunteers as non-employees, but the IRS considers all volunteer firefighters and emergency medical personnel to be employees of their departments.

"If the IRS classifies volunteer firefighters and emergency medical personnel as employees in their final rule, fire departments may be unintentionally forced to comply with requirements that could force them to curtail their emergency response activities or close entirely," the chiefs' group says on its website.

Mr. Barletta said the problem could be even more complicated if the IRS counts volunteer hose companies as one department in towns with more than one hose company or as part of a town's workforce. Definitions like that could bump the total numbers beyond the 50-employee threshold and require offering coverage that towns or hose companies cannot afford, he said. The IRS must also define what sort of volunteer duty counts toward the 30-hour-a-week limit.

Mr. Barletta wrote a letter urging the IRS to write a rule that labels volunteer firefighters as non-employees.

"There needs to be clarification because this could be serious," he said. "That's all we're looking at and that we haven't heard anything concerns me."

Bruce Moeller, chairman of a task force for the fire chiefs group and head of safety and emergency services for Pinellas County, Fla., said the problem arose because the IRS already considers volunteers as employees and requires all departments to issue W-2 forms for any sort of compensation for volunteers. He's sure Congress did not intend to require volunteer fire departments to offer health insurance when it passed the health law.

"Welcome to federal regulations," he said. "It's one of those quirks."

Local officials in volunteer departments said they had not heard of the issue or not heard much about it.

One local fire chief said it never occurred to him that volunteers could be considered employees.

Bill White, a volunteer firefighter for 50 years and leader of the Dive Rescue Specialists in Scott Twp., said an IRS rule requiring offering volunteers health insurance would create an uproar.

"If they push that, that would be just the final nail in the coffin for Obamacare for everybody," he said. "I'm not terribly concerned about it."

He's not concerned because the harm would be too great.

"We're barely paying the bills that we have now," Mr. White said.

John Cudo, a volunteer firefighter and public works department laborer in Taylor and an official with the Northeastern Pennsylvania Volunteer Fireman's Federation, said the possibility caught him by surprise when he heard about it during a firefighters' convention in September. A requirement like that could hurt, but he was unconcerned it will happen.

"We're not employees," he said.

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