This Subtopic addresses the accounting and reporting for postretirement health benefits for entities in the coal industry affected by the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act of 1992.
Current and projected operating deficits of certain benefit trusts established by the United Mine Workers of America and the Bituminous Coal Operators' Association, Inc. prompted the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act of 1992 (the Act). The Act creates a new multiemployer benefit plan called the United Mine Workers of America Combined Benefit Fund (the Combined Fund), which will provide medical and death benefits to all beneficiaries of certain earlier trusts who were actually receiving benefits as of July 20, 1992. In 1993, the Combined Fund began paying those beneficiaries their medical and death benefits. The Act provides for the assignment of beneficiaries to former employers and the allocation of any unassigned beneficiaries (referred to as orphans) to entities using a formula included in the legislation. The Act requires that responsibility for funding those payments be assigned to entities (or persons related to the entities) that had been signatories to a coal wage agreement. Under the act an entity's annual cost of benefits is based on the number of beneficiaries assigned to it plus a percentage of the cost of unassigned beneficiaries, which is a function of the number of orphans times the per-beneficiary premium.