USA: Healthcare: Compliance: Departments Issue Proposed Regulations that Allow Health Reimbursement Arrangements to Pay for Individual Health Insurance Coverage
Information provided by Asinta’s US Partner, Alliant Employee Benefits.
On October 23, 2018, the Departments of the Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services (Departments) released draft regulations that significantly relax the regulation of HRAs.
Those regulations: (1) allow integration of HRAs with individual market coverage, and (2) create a new “excepted benefit” class of HRA that falls outside of ACA regulation. In other words, employers will be permitted under certain circumstances to pay for employees’ individual coverage through an HRA.
The proposed rule also addresses how these two new HRA options interact and how they affect eligibility for Exchange Premium Tax Credit (PTC) subsidies. These rules are set to go into effect January 1, 2010, but the Departments promise subsequent guidance on how “individually integrated HRAs” affect the ACA’s employer Pay or Play mandate.