Call it PPACA, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), ObamaCare, or “just the next big pain in the *** that Payroll and HR professionals have to deal with,” Health Care Reform is here to stay and coming at us like a freight train!
This month, HR and payroll professionals have a reprieve in Ascentis’ Health Care Reform Master Class. Designed to help busy HR and Payroll professionals stay up to date with some unprecedentedly complex laws and emerging regulations, this series will present a monthly bulletin and accompanying one-hour webinars focusing on particularly important, complex, and sometimes even murky areas of the law, focusing on the administrative impact for employers. These webinars are also submitted to the Human Resource Institute and the American Payroll Association for recertification credit hours.
April’s first installment in the series will focus on the issue of Retroactive Coverage Termination. Where once it was pretty much the “wild, wild West” and almost any agreement between employer and insurer about rolling back coverage retroactively for a covered employee or dependent was presumptively valid, the ACA has changed all that.
In fact, the combination and interaction of COBRA (for required offers of coverage continuation post-termination), HIPAA (for required creditable coverage notices), USERRA (for Armed Service members taking temporary leave for active duty military service) and the ACA (for coverage termination rules) will create a maze of inter-relationships, dependencies, shifting timelines, and even potential conflicts for us to sort through. Add to that the fact that each of these laws has its own “layer-cake” of potential civil, administrative, and even (under select circumstances) criminal penalties for non-compliance, and HR professionals may find themselves in “the perfect storm” of best practice, compliance, and cost containment challenges.
Let us help you navigate these choppy waters. We look forward to connecting with you in our first master class!
