Budget Deal Ends Obamacare Enrollment Mandate

[Geee]

Heartland:

Just in time for Halloween, Congress and President Barack Obama reached a budget agreement that some experts, including the Urban Institute’s Richard Johnson, are calling “an unexpected bit of sanity coming out of Washington,” according to a report by CNBC.

 

I’m not sure how “sane” it is to continue kicking the we’re-just-going-to-let-someone-else-deal-with-the-looming-debt-crisis can down the road, but one of the budget deal’s negotiated provisions dealing with Obamacare has many large employers breathing a sigh of relief. After much negotiating, an onerous requirement has been permanently eliminated: the requirement that would have forced all employers with 200 or more full-time employees to automatically enroll new full-time employees in a health care insurance plan and would have required the employer to automatically re-enroll employees during open-enrollment.

 

The requirement for large employers was added to the Fair Labor Standards Act when the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed in March 2010. The provision was set to go into effect in 2017, although many had speculated the plan would be delayed because the Department of Labor (DOL) had delayed the effective date of the automatic enrollment requirement until it could release regulations, which never occurred.

 

Under the automatic-enrollment provision, employees would have been given an opportunity to voluntarily choose a health insurance plan or decline having a plan. Large employers would have had to create large, complex reporting systems for their employees to ensure they weren’t automatically enrolling in a plan someone who didn’t want one.