Employee benefit plans—especially retirement and health care—have become an increasingly important part of the employment relationship. For employers, these plans represent an important part of the total compensation package, a tool for retention and recruitment, and a growing financial and compliance burden. For employees, these plans represent a key part of their overall financial security and wellbeing, a financial burden, and a source of complexity and frustration. In effect, it’s complicated.
Our firm is dedicated to helping employers manage these complexities and focus on the important things.
In my previous post I discussed how the federal role in U.S. healthcare markets is likely to shrink in a post-ACA environment. So, who picks up the slack?
It is likely that the largest increases in role/autonomy will go to individual states and insurance companies. This blog post focuses on a potential increase in states’ roles; my next post discusses increased control that may flow to insurance companies.
Here’s how this may play out:
Allen Steinberg
22.02.2017 12.29 CST
Bottom line: under the ACA the federal government became a much more active player in the U.S. healthcare markets. Whatever else occurs in the looming political firefight, it is safe to say that this active role is going to shrink.
As efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) take shape, it is too early to make specific predictions. But, based on previous proposals and public statements made by some of the key players—and some recently leaked documents - it is reasonable to anticipate some of the broader policy directions that are likely to emerge. This blog post is the first in a series that will discuss some of the shifts likely to emerge in the post-ACA environment.