The IRS has responded to President Trump’s Executive Order (discussed in our prior blog post) with a Notice issued this week. The June Executive Order directed the IRS to issue guidance to expand the care high deductible health plans (“HDHP”) can cover before participants reach their deductible, while still allowing the participant to ...
If you sponsor a self-insured group health plan, make sure you’ve set your calendar alerts for the annual PCORI fee (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute fee) for the 2018 plan year. As a reminder, the PCORI fee was put into place by the ACA to help fund the Patient Outcomes Research Institute and is based on the average number of covered ...
On June 24, 2019, President Trump issued the “Executive Order on Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First.” The Order affects the healthcare system at large, but this post focuses on the impacts the Order has on health plans, including the future changes a plan sponsor may have to make to their ...
By Lyndsey Barnett and Laura Caty
Marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug. Period.
Until the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) removes marijuana from the classification of a Schedule I drug and unless marijuana is legalized under federal law, group health plans do not have the option of covering medical marijuana. According to the DEA, Schedule I drugs have a ...
While it may be early to be thinking about next year for some, others are already knee deep in making health plan changes for 2020. For those that like to get a jump on planning for next year, the IRS just announced the new 2020 contribution limits for a health savings account (“HSA”), as well as the 2020 minimum deductible and maximum ...
The following facts lead to a common situation experienced by many employers:
- Employee participates in the employer’s medical plan;
- Employee makes contributions to the plan for his share of the premium payment though payroll deductions;
- Employee later goes on unpaid FMLA leave, and during Employee’s leave the premium payments are no ...
At a conference late last week, an IRS official announced that the IRS was working on guidance to answer the many questions that it has received after the issuance of the PLR last August approving a unique student loan repayment arrangement inside of a retirement plan. With student loan debt continuing to rise and be an issue for employees, more and ...
Many self-funded health plan sponsors are aware that their plans are subject to HIPAA and that they must maintain policies and procedures to comply with the law. But compliance with HIPAA does not stop in the planning phase. As the threat and occurrence of security incidents become more and more common, plan sponsors must be ready to take action when ...
No. Your eyes are not playing tricks on you and there is not a typo in my title. HHS just announced that it is decreasing the annual limit on HIPAA violations for three of the four tiers of violations.
In 2009, Congress greatly increased the amount of penalties that HHS could assess for HIPAA violations in the HITECH Act. HITECH established four tiers ...
In the latest version of the IRS’s correction program for retirement plans (referred to as EPCRS), the IRS has provided guidance that will make it easier for plan sponsors to correct certain plan loan errors. Prior to this guidance, all plan loan errors had to be corrected through either the Voluntary Correction Program (VCP) or Audit CAP ...