The Agenda
How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.
It seems that almost nobody was ready for the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act to take effect — not government regulators, not the managers of health insurance exchanges, and not the employers — and that a year’s delay could buy time for the government to write regulations and for companies to figure out how to comply with them. But many businesses hope to get something else from the one-year delay: an opportunity to rewrite other aspects of the mandate that they find difficult.
In particular, businesses are unhappy that the law defines a full-time employee to whom a business must offer affordable health insurance as someone who works at least 30 hours a week. “We’ve argued that the 40-hour workweek is where most people think the full-time work level should be,” said Neil Trautwein, employee benefits policy counsel at the National Retail Federation, a trade association. “It goes to the compliance burden on employers, and employees, and the balance of full- and part-time employees. What happens to people who prefer to work part time, and find their hours reduced to stay under the 30-hour limit?”
A 30-hour threshold, he added, will create “a new class of 29-ers,” workers with schedules set just below the threshold.
Mr. Trautwine and others have portrayed the 30-hour threshold in the Affordable Care Act as a source of confusion and complexity, since the Fair Labor Standards Act sets the full-time workweek at 40 hours (and establishes rules for overtime pay based on that). The lower definition will require many companies to offer insurance to more employees, which would make providing benefits much more expensive — hence the schedule juggling that Mr. Trautwein foresees.
Tracking who is entitled to benefits might also become more challenging for some companies. “It’s all about proving who’s a full-time employee and who’s not,” said Alan Cohen, chief strategy officer for Liazon, which operates a private benefits exchange for employers. “A lot of these employers don’t track hours, so they don’t even know if they’re full time.” One client, a home health care provider, for example, pays its nurses per visit, not per hour. “This company not only has to provide health insurance, but it also has to buy new systems to track hours,” he said.
“Businesses are looking for something that’s easier to administer and doesn’t require them to give coverage to people only working for you for two or three days,” said J.D. Piro, a senior vice president at the benefits consulting company Aon Hewitt in charge of the health law group. The 30-hour requirement, he said, ran contrary to the spirit of the health law overhaul.
“The idea behind the Affordable Care Act is to keep employers in the game and allow them to provide insurance without making major changes either way,” he said, “not forcing them to expand coverage or forcing them to drop coverage for employees.”
Mr. Trautwein, of the retail group, said that the delay would give his group and others time to press their cases to Congress, where, he said, legislation revising the 30-hour rule has bipartisan support. Once the mandate goes into effect, he said, it would be harder to change it. “We really need relief before implementation,” he said. His group would also like to see the threshold for which companies must abide by the mandate increased from 50 employees.
Mr. Piro, however, said he doubted that such legislation would go very far. “I don’t think there are going to be any changes to this act with the current split in Congress,” he said.
A veteran health policy consultant in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, explained the situation this way: “Opponents of the legislation don’t want to fix this issue, they want to use it as fodder to repeal the whole law. They have no interest in moderating or amending the law, because that implicitly affirms that the law is worth amending.”
Meanwhile, the law’s supporters won’t amend the law, the consultant said, because they fear opponents would use the bill to derail the whole law. “We’re really at a point where we implement the law as it was enacted,” he said.
Apparently, lobbyists and benefit advisers were genuinely surprised at the administration’s decision to delay the mandate, but in the current political environment, this consultant said, they should not have been.
“If you understand both the political dynamic and the fact that this executive decision does not undermine the foundation or infrastructure of the law but still allows for being responsive to employer concerns,” he said, “it’s almost a no-brainer that this decision was made.”
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/the-employer-mandate-has-been-delayed-will-it-be-rewritten/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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