This is the way ESI ends… not with a bang, but a whimper. Recently, healthcare experts including Zeke Emanuel, Jon Gruber, and Capital IQ have forecasted the end of employer sponsored insurance (ESI). Although all believe ESI will ultimately fade away, they disagree on the exact timing. The chart below shows the forecasts of all […]
Yesterday, two courts issued two diametrically opposed rulings. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that people cannot receive a government subsidy if they live in one of the 36 states served by the Federal exchange. By contrast, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the IRS’s authority allowing subsidies in all states. Although the […]
This week the New York Times published an article with a very compelling headline – “I.R.S. Bars Employers From Dumping Workers Into Health Exchanges”. Unfortunately, this isn’t the full story, but it was enough to create some drama. As the exchanges have started to settle in and the debate over the future of ACA starts […]
Bloomberg News Target Corp. (TGT) will end health insurance for part-time employees in April, joining Trader Joe’s Co., Home Depot Inc. and other U.S. retailers that have scaled back benefits in response to changes from Obamacare. About 10 percent of part-time employees, defined as those working fewer than 30 hours a week, use Target’s health […]
This is the third in a 3-part series entitled “Is COBRA dead?” Previous posts can be found here and here. The Health affairs blog recently broke news on two critical announcements from the Employer Benefits Services Administration (EBSA) around changing COBRA rules. First, EBSA created a very-special “special enrollment period” for people on COBRA, giving […]
This is the second in a 3-part series entitled “Is COBRA dead?” The first article is available here. As we saw in our previous post, there are huge financial advantages to the exchanges over COBRA. However, when someone leaves a job, like clockwork employers still send out an informative COBRA notification within 2-3 weeks. What’s […]
This is the first in a 3-part series entitled “Is COBRA dead?“ Before Obamacare, COBRA was the definitive short-term safety net for health insurance. If you lost your job, the fastest way to get insured without seeing a gap in coverage was to sign up. But COBRA has always been expensive. Choosing COBRA means you […]
Every year, health premiums rise. That’s not news, despite recent fears around the potentially accelerating growth. Lost in the press is the fact that costs vary widely across different options. To date, few have tried to answer the question: Is health insurance on the individual exchange cheaper or more expensive than the employer-sponsored group market? […]
Recent developments regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have led to some surprising and probably unintended consequences for workers with dependents and their employers. Legislators clarified that workers with families whose employers offer qualified healthcare coverage will not be eligible for government assistance or premium tax credits on the public healthcare exchange in […]
News The Obama Administration, through the Department of Treasury, announced that it will not enforce the Affordable Care Act employer mandate for companies with 50-99 employees until 2016. In addition, the new guidance says companies with 100+ employees can meet their obligations under the ACA in 2015 by offering insurance to 70% of their employees. […]