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February 19, 2014          Get Retirement News  |  Advertise
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Employee Benefits Jobs

Associate Account Manager
Cammack Retirement Group
in NY

Regional Vice President/Retirement Plan Wholesaler
Ohio National Financial Services
in GA, IL, IN, TN, TX

Senior Defined Contribution (DC) Analyst
Retirement Horizons Inc.
in TX

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Webcasts and Conferences

ACOPA Advanced Actuarial Conference
June 2, 2013 in NV
(American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries (ASPPA))

New Regulations Help Employers Ease into Pay Or Play
February 26, 2014 WEBCAST
(Miller Johnson)

Pension Derisking Law Policy and Politics
March 5, 2014 WEBCAST
(Worldwide Employee Benefits Network)

2014 Webinar: Comparing Roth and Traditional IRAs
March 18, 2014 WEBCAST
(Ascensus)

HIPAA Privacy & Security
April 25, 2014 in CA
(Thomson Reuters / EBIA)

2014 IHC FORUM & Expo
May 7, 2014 in GA
(The Institute for HealthCare Consumerism)

2014 IRA Institute
June 9, 2014 in MN
(Ascensus)

View All Webcasts and Conferences


  LinkedIn   Twitter   Facebook Hand-picked links to the web's best news articles,
official guidance, jobs, webcasts and more.
[Guidance Overview]

New Regulations Help Employers Ease Into Pay-or-Play (PDF)
8 pages. Excerpt: "There are no special rules applicable to employees hired for short term assignments, other than seasonal employees. Therefore, any employee hired for a specified project or period of time must be counted in the same manner as a regular employee, unless the employee meets the criteria necessary to be a seasonal employee as described above." (Miller Johnson)  


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[Guidance Overview]

Employer Mandate Final Regs Contain Many Clarifications and Some Transition Relief
"This alert primarily focuses on [the] changes/clarifications [of the final regs], including: [1] Is my business subject to the employer mandate? -- determining applicable large employer status; [2] What hours must be counted? -- defining hours of service; [3] Who must be offered coverage? -- identifying full-time employees; [4] When is coverage affordable? [5] What if an employer cannot obtain an insurance policy? [6] What if coverage is offered by a different organization (e.g., PEO, multiemployer plan)? and [7] Which dependents must be offered coverage?" (Seyfarth Shaw LLP)  

[Guidance Overview]

Final Play or Pay Regulations Issued for Employer Compliance
"Large employers will be able to avoid the $2,000 per-employee penalty in 2015 if they offer minimum essential coverage (MEC) to at least 70% of their full-time employees. However, employers should be aware that with respect to those employees who are not offered MEC (or who are offered MEC that is either unaffordable or does not provide minimum value), an employer may be subject to the $3,000 per employee penalty if a full-time employee qualifies for a federal subsidy in a public exchange." (Towers Watson)  

[Guidance Overview]

IRS Final Rule on ACA Play-or-Pay Mandate Enables Employers to Finalize Compliance Plans
"The IRS will contact employers to inform them of their potential liability and provide them an opportunity to respond before liability is assessed or demand for payment is made. This process is expected to occur annually after employees' individual tax returns are due for that year claiming premium tax credits and after the due date for employers that meet the 50 full-time employee threshold to file information returns identifying their full-time employees and describing the coverage that was offered (if any)." (Vedder Price)  

[Guidance Overview]

Agencies Propose to Modify Excepted Benefit Regs
"The proposed regulations eliminate the requirement that participants must contribute to limited-scope dental or vision benefits for the benefits to qualify as excepted. The proposal would also add a new limited wraparound coverage option that would qualify as an excepted benefit. Under the transition relief, EAPs constitute excepted benefits as long as they do not provide 'significant benefits in the nature of medical care or treatment'.... Any future guidance that is more restrictive than the proposal will not take effect before January 1, 2015. The departments also propose to make the limited-scope wraparound coverage provisions effective for plan years starting in 2015." (Towers Watson)  


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[Guidance Overview]

Final Regulations Issued Regarding Employer Shared Responsibility Under the ACA
"Variable hour or seasonal employees who experience a change in status, such that the employee would have reasonably been expected to be employed on a non-seasonal basis on average at least 30 hours of service per week if initially hired into that position, must be provided health coverage by the first day of the fourth calendar month following the change in employment status ... if the employee averaged 30 hours of service or more per week during the initial measurement period." (McDermott Will & Emery)  

What If Your Employer Gets Access to Your Medical Records?
"Identify theft in medical settings is long-time problem that health reform has not remedied.... To this volatile mix, employers have welcomed wellness vendors, who are proving all too quickly that people in industries built on deception will eventually do what you expect them to do, like leave data-laden flash drives laying around. It is only a few small steps from foolish and inappropriate to potential civil and criminal liability, and enthusiastically adding wellness vendors to our health privacy turmoil was liking drilling new holes in a block of swiss cheese." (The Health Care Blog)  

Employers Will Continue Sponsoring Health Benefits for Employees and Retirees, But Deliver Those Benefits in New Ways
"Almost 40 percent of organizations expect to migrate toward a 'house money/house rules' approach, which requires employees to take a more active role in their health by offering them a few plan options, plus initiatives designed to improve health and reduce costs. Thirty-three percent said offering group-based health benefits to active employees through a private health exchange will be their preferred approach in the next three-to-five years." (Aon Hewitt)  

Colorado's Elusive Goal: A Complete, Useful Health Care Price List
"Colorado is one of eleven states that are starting to make a lot of health care prices public. It's taken years. An 'all payer claims database' is step one in Colorado. It's basically a giant shoebox that aims to collect a copy of every receipt for a health care service in a given state.... However, turning this price information from eye-crossing spreadsheet rows to consumer-friendly formats is hard. Colorado's effort has taken years. Laws had to be passed to get insurance companies to send in their claims data ... and sorting through all the information is a lot tougher than organizing a pile of paper receipts in a shoebox." (The Washington Post; subscription may be required)  

Comments Due on Proposed Regulation on Excepted Benefits
"Plan sponsors need to decide whether they want to comment on the proposed rules. Comments are due on or before February 24, 2014.... A lot of legal interpretation is needed on this new [wraparound] option. For example, the preamble to the proposed regulations implies that this limited wraparound coverage can only be offered to employees for whom primary health coverage is not affordable. Additionally, definitions for items such as 'employee' are not clear, e.g., whether part-time employees are included or excluded." (Cheiron)  

Ways and Means Committee Releases Two Bills to Limit Reach of ACA Employer Mandate
"The first bill (H.R. 2575, Save American Workers Act of 2014) working its way through Congress was drafted in response to concerns that employers will lay off employees or cut hours in order to fall below the 50 full-time employee threshold and avoid having to offer health coverage or pay penalties.... [T]he bill seeks to increase the minimum service hours to 40 hours per week for purposes of the ACA.... The second bill (H.R. 3979, Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act), proposes to exempt bona fide volunteer services from being considered services by a full-time employee." (Benefits Bryan Cave)  

Shared Responsibility in Consumer Assistance
"This brief explores ways in which states are sharing the responsibility of consumer assistance with the federal marketplace in three key areas: [1] Coordination between states and the federally facilitated marketplace (FFM) or state partnership marketplace (SPM) on marketing and advertising initiatives; [2] Coordination between states and navigators and other in-person assisters in FFM and SPM states; and [3] Coordination between the federal government and state Medicaid agencies in FFM and SPM states to develop a system for consumers who wish to appeal decisions about their eligibility for insurance affordability programs." (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)  

Federal Court Ruling Casts Doubt on State Power to Restrict Health Reform Navigators
"The Missouri decision is an important first word on the legality of state navigator restrictions, though almost certainly not the last. The case itself continues; the court may reverse its ruling at a later stage ... and Missouri may appeal. And as it stands, the decision is not binding elsewhere; similar restrictions in states like Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin remain in place. Nevertheless, the ruling seems likely to influence by example." (The Commonwealth Fund)  

The Inevitability of Disruption in Health Reform
"Concern about even modest disruption of existing health insurance coverage by the ACA regenerates the belief that 'there's got to be a better way' to make coverage available, adequate and affordable. But this brief shows that disruption is inevitable in any health reform and that the ACA's disruption is remarkably limited -- far less than single payer proposals on the left or market-based proposals on the right. Further, unlike even many narrowly targeted reform alternatives, the ACA improves the pooling of risk that is essential to effective insurance." (Urban Institute)  

Breast Cancer and Government Coverage Versus Private Health Insurance
"Covering all breast cancer cases registered from 1996 to 2005, the data once again suggest that the uninsured fare almost as well as people on Medicaid.... Several interpretations are possible. One is that the health behaviors of those on Medicaid differ in important, and poorly considered, ways from the health behaviors of those with private insurance. Another is that these results are roughly similar for people on Medicaid and those who are uninsured because during the time covered by the study, people in the United States with serious illness could access health care whether or not they had coverage." (John Goodman's Health Policy Blog)  

Obamacare's Latest Surprise for Taxpayers?
"[The risk] corridors are supposed to expire in three years.... The insurers have clearly been willing to lose money on these policies for a couple of years in order to help the exchanges get established. But ... they may be threatening to bolt unless they get some guarantee that they can sell policies people will actually be willing to buy.... With the administration subsidizing the lion's share of any losses, the incentives to control costs would be dramatically weakened.... Basically, the administration would be violating all the promises that were made about deficit reduction and cost control in a desperate bid to keep insurers on the exchanges. It's hard to see how they can do this legally, as the text of the statute seems quite clear[.]" (Bloomberg)  

Regulatory Redistribution in the Market for Health Insurance
"In the early 1990s, several U.S. states enacted community rating regulations to equalize the health insurance premiums paid by the healthy and the sick. Consistent with severe adverse selection pressures, their private coverage rates fell by around 8 percentage points more than rates in comparable markets over subsequent years. By the early 2000s, following substantial public insurance expansions, coverage rates in several of these states had improved significantly. As theory predicts, recoveries were largest where public coverage expanded disproportionately for high cost populations. The analysis highlights that the incidence of public insurance and community rating regulations are tightly intertwined." (National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER])  

[Opinion]

The Employer Mandate: Dukakis All Over Again
"Last week's adjustment to the employer mandate represents another battle in the political war of attrition between employers and those who want to carry out the federal health reform law. A similar war was fought in Massachusetts in the years after the Michael Dukakis administration and continued for decades.... Both laws were passed when Democrats held the executive position and a majority in the legislature. In both cases, one-party rule ended soon after the health law was signed.... One hundred months after the Dukakis law was passed, its employer penalty was finally repealed." (Casey B. Mulligan in The New York Times; subscription may be required)  

[Opinion]

Congress Answered This Question: Corporations Are Covered Under RFRA
"Whatever one thinks about the corporations, the individual plaintiffs are clearly exercising their religion. The government appears to believe that these individuals forfeited their religious-liberty rights with respect to the business when they incorporated the business, and therefore forfeited any right not to pay for emergency contraception and IUDs when the business grew to more than fifty employees.... If these plaintiffs will not pay for what they believe to be such an extraordinary wrong, then in the government's view, they are barred from owning any business with more than fifty employees." (Prof. Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia School of Law, via SCOTUSblog)  

[Opinion]

A Health Reform Republicans and Democrats Agree On
"At a 50% marginal tax rate, government at all levels is paying for half the cost of any additional insurance the family chooses to buy. Insurance that costs $1 will be viewed as worthwhile, even if it is worth only 51 cents to the buyer.... Alternatively, if the buyer saves a dollar by choosing less generous coverage, that dollar will become taxable income. The government will seize one-half of it.... With a fixed sum tax credit, buyers are not encouraged to over-insure or under-insure. Every costly feature of health insurance (lower deductibles and copayments, wider networks, more generous benefits) will be at the expense of all other ways of spending the consumer's dollars." (John Goodman's Health Policy Blog)  

Benefits in General; Executive Compensation

[Guidance Overview]

Deadline for Nasdaq Certification Requirement for Compensation Committee Independence and Change to Nasdaq Independence Rules
"Companies listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market must certify that they have complied with Nasdaq's listing standards regarding compensation committees by the earlier of 30 days after their 2014 annual meeting (if that meeting is held after January 15) or October 31, 2014.... [A recent change] removes the absolute ban on compensation committee directors receiving compensatory fees. Instead, it requires a listed company's board to 'consider all factors specifically relevant to determining whether a director has a relationship to the company which is material to that director's ability to be independent from management in connection with the duties of a compensation committee member. '" (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati)  

Now is the Time to Test and Report Your Pay and Performance Relationship (PDF)
"Assessing the relationship between pay and performance requires establishing methodologies for calculating pay and evaluating performance, as well as determining the time period to analyze. The most traditional view for reviewing the pay and performance relationship reflects actual compensation granted, which includes base salary, annual incentive paid and grant date value of long-term incentives. While this is consistent with proxy reported information, it does not reflect actual pay received nor a full picture of performance." (Meridian Compensation Partners, LLC)  

A Response to: The Warped Math of Executive Compensation
"Time-based vesting gives the CEO stability and security. If the CEO is always worried that any misstep will be the end of his income, job and perhaps career they have little incentive to try anything new. Systems that depend only on more of the same are destined to create nothing new of true import. Time-based vesting provides the foundation on which our technology innovation was built. Correctly designed performance-based equity provides the reward if the risks payoff (for everyone)." (Performensation)  

Press Releases

CalPERS Adopts New Demographic Assumptions
CalPERS (California Public Employees' Retirement System)

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