HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and FSAs (Flexible Spending Accounts): Are both accounts designed to help employees put aside money to pay for extra medical expenses on a pre-tax basis, both have rules around maximum contributions and permissible distributions, and both have remarkably similar sounding acronyms. However, the similarities for the most part, stop here.
The recently passed and signed spending bill repealed three sections of the ACA: (1) a 40 percent tax on generous “Cadillac” employer health plans, (2) a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices, and (3) the health insurance tax. Congress had previously prevented the Cadillac tax from taking effect until 2022, and the House voted over the summer to abandon it permanently, but it is finally repealed for good. The medical device and health insurance taxes have been enforced on and off since the Affordable Care Act was passed, but with the enactment of this new legislation, each of the three sections have been repealed with differing effective dates.
In response to an Executive Order on Improving Price and Quality Transparency in American Healthcare to Put Patients First issued June 24, 2019, proposed regulations were released by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) on November 12, 2019.
Here at Hays Companies Research and Compliance, we have noticed an increased number of questions about the look back measurement method for non-full-time employees. This likely has to do with the fact that the ACA’s Employer Mandate has been the law of the land for about five years now, most employers have tracking systems embedded within their payroll and HRIS systems that automatically calculate who has qualified for coverage, and as a result, the hard won knowledge of the Employer Mandate’s commencement has gone a little rusty (for some).
Many employee benefits are subject to annual dollar limits that are periodically increased for inflation. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently announced cost-of-living adjustments to the annual dollar limits for various welfare and retirement plan limits for 2020. Although some of the limits will remain the same, most of the limits will increase for 2020.
The January 31st W-2 deadline will be here before you know it, and there’s a lot your team needs to prepare between now and then. As we approach 2019 year-end, employers should keep in mind certain health and welfare benefits-related information that must be reported on the W-2 Earnings Statements they provide to employees. The IRS has issued 2019 General Instructions for Forms W-2 and W-3.
Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) inhabit a strange place in the employee benefit world: they often exist because of health coverage offered by an employer, employers can contribute to them, but they are ultimately owned by the individual and are not group sponsored health plans. Some strange rules result.
Last week, the US Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treasury and Labor jointly issued an FAQ stating that for 2020 they will not enforce new guidelines (which were incorporated into HHS’s Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2020) regarding drug manufacturers’ assistance (coupons or copay assistance programs).
Many employers that sponsor self-insured health plans are under the assumption that their Notice of Privacy Practices covers their responsibilities under HIPAA. While the Notice of Privacy Practices is an excellent starting point, there is more to HIPAA Privacy and Security that you need to know.
As the Hays Research and Compliance team looks towards the new year, we want to inform our clients that there will be two plan design changes to consider for 2020: