Obamacare Pushing Employers to Make Tough Decisions About Coverage
... The company’s health care costs are already up 20 percent compared with a year ago, and half of that jump came from covering new mandates required by the new health-care law, including extending coverage for dependents until age 26, eliminating the lifetime cap on benefits and covering certain wellness programs. The extra costs are necessary, Peppe said, because his company competes with other manufacturers and the federal government to hire workers. A competitive benefits package makes a big difference....
There are simply too many unanswered questions to know what will be the best move for the company in the future. “It’s not like you can set it and you’re done,” Peppe said. “A lot of the nuances affecting things now isn’t so much what’s in the legislation, it’s what are the agencies doing with it. It’s still pretty unsettled.” That’s leaving companies with little choice but to wing it, effectively playing a game for which many of the rules have yet to be written.
Every week, the Internal Revenue Service, the Labor Department and the Department of Health and Human Services — the federal agencies responsible for issuing the bulk of the ACA-related regulations — are putting out new rules for what companies should and shouldn’t be doing when implementing the new health-care law. Many regulations have yet to be announced or finalized, including whether employers must provide coverage to seasonal workers or workers whose hours fluctuate from week to week (under the new law, employers must provide coverage for employees who work at least 30 hours a week) — which could greatly affect cost. The details matter....
“I’m spending a lot more time keeping on top of these [health care law] issues because of the volume or regulations and changes in this area,” he said. “At the same time, we’re getting a lot more pressure in-house to keep reducing cost.”...
