Companies curious about a major airline’s unvaccinated healthcare premium surcharge are discovering that it may be too complex to copy. The airline recently announced that unvaccinated employees enrolled in the company’s health plan would see a $200 monthly surcharge. In this Bloomberg Law article, McDermott Partner Judith Wethall said the compliance hurdles are “tricky and kind of dilute the message.”
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently published its annual proposed changes to the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule, which include several key telehealth and other virtual care-related proposals. The proposals address long-standing restrictions that have historically limited the use of telehealth and virtual care, including geographic and originating site restrictions, and limitations on audio-only care, as well as coverage extensions for some services added during the COVID-19 public health emergency.
The Biden administration is giving insurers more time to follow the insurer price transparency rule and the ban on surprise billing. Federal regulators will delay enforcement of machine-readable file provider rates until July 1, rather than the start of 2022. In this article published in Modern Healthcare, McDermott Partner Kate McDonald noted that the initial timeline was “very aggressive.”
As companies consider whether or not to introduce vaccine mandates for employees, there is interest among some employers to increase health care premiums or impose financial penalties on employees who refuse vaccination. One major airline, for example, recently announced that unvaccinated employees enrolled in the company’s health plan would see a $200 monthly surcharge. However, according to McDermott Partner Judith Wethall in The Hill, financial penalties for the unvaccinated are legally complicated, and vaccine mandates likely pose less regulatory issues for employers to impose.
The US Departments of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Labor, and the Office of Personnel Management issued an Interim Final Rule with comment implementing portions of the No Surprises Act, legislation enacted in December 2020 that bars surprise billing beginning January 1, 2022. Under the law, payers and providers (including hospitals, facilities, individual practitioners and air ambulance providers) are prohibited from billing patients more than in-network cost-sharing amounts in emergency and non-emergency circumstances. This IFR establishes regulations defining the payment methodology. The regulation proposes the methodology payers must use to determine cost sharing; the information payers must share with out-of-network providers; the process for submitting and receiving consumer complaints; and the format and details of the notice and consent requirements.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently issued Revenue Procedure 2021-30, which provides an updated version of the Employee Plans Compliance Resolution System (EPCRS).
EPCRS is the IRS’s comprehensive program for plan sponsors to correct tax-qualified plan errors. This EPCRS update expands plan sponsors’ ability and methods to correct overpayments and to self-correct certain plan failures without filing a Voluntary Compliance Program (VCP) application, which can be costly and time-consuming. However, the IRS also eliminated the ability of plan sponsors to submit an anonymous VCP application, replacing anonymous VCP submissions with a pre-submission conference option.
Research continues to shed light on COVID-19’s long-term health effects for some people, and these “post-COVID conditions” will create additional challenges for employers.
In this Law360 article, McDermott partner Carole A. Spink says employers should be aware that long-haul COVID symptoms mean additional accommodations for employees.
“As they have done throughout the pandemic, employers should have a plan for addressing potential long-term absences as a result of post-COVID effects. On the practical side, at some point employers may need to determine whether a particular situation has become such that providing a continuing reasonable accommodation would pose an undue burden,” Spink notes.
How should corporate boards respond to the Delta variant?
In this Forbes article, McDermott’s Michael Peregrine argues that the way in which a board responds to the challenge may “well define its future credibility on workforce culture concerns.”
“The new, Delta-prompted potential for intra-organizational clash is the latest and potentially one of the most significant of these concerns,” Peregrine writes.
With the upward trend in commercial bankruptcy filings likely to continue, what happens to collective bargaining agreements in bankruptcy?
In this Law360 article, McDermott’s Stephania C. Sanon outlines the options that debtor employers have during this challenging legal process.
On April 9, 2021, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released PLR 202114001 (PLR), which provides guidance on the deductibility of medical costs under Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code relating to fertility expenses for same-sex couples. The PLR disallows most of the costs incurred by a same-sex couple wishing to have a child.
However, according to McDermott partner John T. Lutz, the IRS’ distinction between deductible costs for medical procedures attributable to the taxpayer and non-deductible costs for medical procedures attributable to third parties raises unique concerns about the equitable treatment of different taxpayers.
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