This article appears to say that the main impact of the bill is to tax folks on the high end, and subsidize people on the low end to reduce the number of uninsured, while also setting up mininum insurance standards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/health/policy/25employer.html
Now that the Senate has caught up with the House by passing a sweeping health care bill, lawmakers are on the verge of extending coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance.
But what about the roughly 160 million workers and their dependents who already have health insurance through an employer? For many people, the result of the long, angry health care debate in Washington may be little more than more of the same.
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The other proposed changes for employer-provided coverage seem aimed mainly at workers whose benefits are either very generous or exceedingly skimpy.
On the generous end, about a fifth of employers now offer health plans that could be affected by a new 40 percent excise tax in the Senate bill on so-called Cadillac policies, according to an estimate by Mercer, a benefits consulting firm. That tax, to be imposed on annual premiums that exceeded $23,000 for family coverage, would go into effect in 2013. For example, if an insurer, or a self-insured employer, offers a plan costing $25,000, it must pay a 40 percent tax on the $2,000 that is above the threshold, or $800.
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Congress also seems intent on establishing some minimum insurance standards so people with coverage could not end up with large piles of unpaid medical bills anyway. Both the House and Senate bills contain measures meant to eliminate lifetime maximum limits on coverage, for example.
But that might end up affecting relatively few people. Many plans limit how much they will pay out over a lifetime, but the ceilings are generally so high that the vast majority of people never hit them, according to a new study that used existing coverage for workers in California to compare the House and Senate proposals.
The “impact of this change will be minimal on most employers, but would be quite meaningful for the small number of employees who meet the limits,” according to the study, conducted by policy analysts from the University of California, Berkeley, the benefits consultant Watson Wyatt Worldwide and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
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Congress is also considering annual limits on out-of-pocket medical costs. The House seems to think $5,000 is as much as somebody should pay in medical bills, while the Senate has picked a figure closer to $6,000
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