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[Official Guidance]
Text of 2015 Instructions for IRS Form 8941: Credit for Small Employer Health Insurance Premiums (PDF)
30 pages. "Eligible small employers (defined [in these instructions]) use Form 8941 to figure the credit for small employer health insurance premiums for tax years beginning after 2009. For tax years beginning after 2013, the credit is only available for a 2 consecutive tax year credit period. The maximum credit is generally a percentage of premiums the employer paid during the tax year for certain health insurance coverage the employer provided to certain employees enrolled in a qualified health plan offered through a Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) Marketplace. But the credit may be reduced by limitations based on the employer's full-time equivalent employees, average annual wages, adjusted average premiums, and state premium subsidies and tax credits."
(Internal Revenue Service [IRS])
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[Guidance Overview]
ACA Information Returns (AIR) Working Group Meeting, December 15, 2015 (PDF)
52 presentation slides. "[P]revious sessions have provided an overview of the ACA Information Returns program, electronic filing requirements (e.g. forms, schemas, and business rules), Publications 5164 and 5165, Employer Information Reporting Scenarios, indicator standardization, and a Tax Year 2014 recap. This session will focus on reviewing topics that address frequently asked questions, common errors and their resolution, as well as a COBRA update."
(Internal Revenue Service [IRS])
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[Guidance Overview]
FAQs on ACA Preventive Services, Mental Health Parity, and Wellness Plans
"Most of the FAQs do not specify an effective date, which suggests that group health plans should be complying now. According to the departments, however, because earlier guidance might have been reasonably interpreted as not requiring certain coverage, these FAQs will be applied for plan years beginning on or after December 22, 2015, for the two provisions that require coverage without cost sharing for: [1] A specialist consultation before a colonoscopy screening procedure; [2] A pathology exam on a polyp biopsy performed in connection with a colonoscopy screening procedure."
(Towers Watson)
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[Guidance Overview]
PACE Act Provides Relief for Some Mid-Sized Employers
"The PACE Act eliminated the scheduled expansion of the small group market on January 1, 2016 under federal law. Instead, the PACE Act gives states discretion to limit the small group market to only employers with 50 or less employees or to expand it to include employers with 100 or less employees."
(Miller Johnson)
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Employer Health Plans Pay Disproportionate Share of Prescription Drug Costs
"As big a problem as rising drug prices have been for consumers and payers, drug spending represents only 10% of national spending on health. Yet ... drug spending represents almost double that share of health spending (19%) in employer health insurance plans. That is not too much less than the 23% employers spend on inpatient hospital care."
(The Wall Street Journal; subscription may be required)
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Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured
"This paper uses data on 27.6 percent of individuals in the US with employer-sponsored insurance coverage to examine the variation in health spending for the privately insured and understand how provider prices influence spending variation across the US.... [H]ealth care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three across the 306 Hospital Referral Regions (HRRs) in the US.... [T]he correlation between total spending per privately insured beneficiary and total spending per Medicare beneficiary across HRRs is only 0.14.... [V]ariation in providers' transaction prices across HRRs is the primary driver of spending variation for the privately insured, whereas variation in the quantity of care provided across HRRs is the primary driver of Medicare spending variation.... Even after conditioning on many demand and cost factors, hospital prices in monopoly markets are
15.3 percent higher than those in markets with four or more hospitals."
(Health Care Pricing Project)
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Federal District Court Rejects Secular Entity's Challenge to ACA Contraceptive Coverage Requirement
"Unlike the dozens of challenges to the Affordable Care Act contraceptive coverage rule, including the challenge currently before the Supreme Court, this case was brought by a secular organization. Real Alternatives Inc. challenged the contraceptive requirement not under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), as have the other plaintiffs, but as a violation of the Constitution's Equal Protection requirement, and also as arbitrary and capricious and thus impermissible under the Administrative Procedures Act." [Real Alternatives, Inc. v. Burwell, No. 1:15-cv-0105 (M.D. Penn. Dec. 10, 2015)]
(Health Affairs)
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[Opinion]
Contraceptive Mandate Cases: Why the Supreme Court Will Instruct Lower Federal Courts to Stop Second-Guessing Religious Beliefs
"So what's the big deal about signing a form? None, according to the majority of federal courts of appeals that have decided the question. These courts have assessed the moral implication of the issue for themselves and decided that submitting a form does not actually require religious non-profits to facilitate access to contraceptive coverage. The problem is that the affected religious non-profits have reached the exact opposite conclusion, and it is not the role of the federal courts to second-guess the religious organizations' analysis."
(SCOTUSblog)
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Benefits in General; Executive Compensation
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[Guidance Overview]
Considerations for Electronic ERISA Disclosures
"Plan sponsors are asking: Can an employer rely on an employee's generalized consent to receive employee benefit materials electronically as consent to receive the Form 1095-C via e-mail? And, with respect to non-personalized disclosures, such as the Summary Plan Description (SPD), updated plan documents, and Summary Annual Reports (SARs), can an employer satisfy the requirements by just posting on the company's intranet or on a TPA's website? The short answer to these two questions is 'no, and no.' "
(Davis Wright Tremaine LLP)
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2016 Compensation Committee Handbook (PDF)
108 pages. "[This Handbook] is intended to help compensation committee members understand and comply with the duties imposed upon them. [The authors] have also undertaken to describe in some detail the concepts underlying a variety of areas within the bailiwick of compensation committees (for instance, the types of equity awards that are commonly granted and their respective tax treatment) and to provide [their] perspective on some of the many decisions that compensation committees must make (for instance, the pros and cons of hiring a compensation consultant and the factors that go into that hiring decision)."
(Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP)
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