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Employer sponsors of health plans must count members in retiree-only plans and COBRA-eligible plans for purposes of paying into health reform’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Furthermore, employees covered under two or more “specified” policies can be counted (and taxed) more than once. The IRS final rule on employer payment of PCORI fees disregarded employer requests to exclude […]
Employers that sponsor health plans are bracing themselves for a significant tax hit under health reform. Health reform’s transitional reinsurance program, which will require insurers and self-funded plans to pay billions of dollars to partly reimburse commercial insurers writing individual policies for patients with very high medical costs, imposes large costs on employers to further […]
The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered a federal appeals court to rehear a Christian university’s challenge to the health reform law in Liberty University v. Geithner. Reviving the case creates the possibility that the High Court may rule on the case itself sometime in 2013, which would make it the second challenge to health reform […]
New reform standards for health plan value and coverage are important for employers, first because they will determine the kind of insured coverage that small employers buy. But grandfathered and self-funded employer health plans also need to know the rules to avoid penalties under health reform. The proposed rules, which HHS announced on Nov. 20, […]
States will get one more month, until Dec. 14, to notify federal regulators whether they will set up and run their own health insurance exchanges, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told two governors in a letter dated Nov. 15. Without the extension, the deadline for signaling intent would have been Friday, Nov. […]
In other legal action over health reform’s inclusion of reproductive services as mandated benefits, one company blocked the government from forcing it to include contraception coverage in its health plan coverage. The injunction in Legatus v. Sebelius, 2012 WL 5359630 (E.D. Mich., Oct. 31, 2012) was at the request of Weingartz Supply, a for-profit outdoor […]
Religious objections to the health reform law are continuing in the courts, with the reemergence of a constitutional challenge to the reform law (the second such challenge that might reach the U.S. Supreme Court). Gov’t Drops Opposition In this brief, the Obama administration told the U.S. Supreme Court it will not try to block Liberty […]
Health plans and insurers long have been thinking of ways to compensate providers not for volume of care, but for value of care, as an important tool in curbing runaway health inflation. Research over the last two decades recently compiled and reviewed by the Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality shows consistent reductions in what […]
When it comes to health reform’s new Summary of Benefits and Coverage, the feds will give some compliance leeway in cases where plan sponsors cannot fit data into the narrow spaces prescribed in the law, a prominent federal official told benefits attorneys in Washington, D.C. Many in the industry say the health reform law was […]
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently provided more details on his own health reform plan, stating that if elected, on his first day in office, says he will issue an executive order for the federal government to issue health reform waivers to all 50 states, and immediately work on repealing the health reform law passed […]