This is attorney, George Reardon writing at StaffingIndustry.com:
The Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate may have been delayed by a year, but come 2015, staffing firms will have had to decide whether to offer insurance or pay the penalties. For the moment, at least, there’s a middle-ground option that many staffing firms are considering.A loophole in the Affordable Care Act allows employers to avoid the heaviest “employer mandate” penalty of $2,000 per all full-time employees per year by offering so-called “skinny plans” -- a group health plan designed to cover only non-catastrophic health exposures like wellness benefits, preventive care and certain routine medical care. Staffing firms planning to offer skinny plans hope the savings from avoiding the “no offer” penalty will outweigh the combined cost of the skinny insurance and penalties generated by employees who reject the skinny insurance and obtain subsidized coverage from state exchanges.But the plans are not without risk. For example, some employees who accept the employer’s insurance may not fully understand the limited scope of its coverage and believe that it is comprehensive health insurance.Before ACA, employers would not have portrayed the benefits of skinny plans as health insurance; they would have called them wellness benefits. Most employees aren’t very knowledgeable about health insurance. Few of them will understand what a skinny plan is or, more important, what it is not....A catastrophic health expense would be a cruel way for these employees to learn about the limits of their coverage. ...Sponsors of skinny plans should plan to explain to their employees continually and in plain language that such plans are not the equivalent of traditional health insurance and that they need to consider obtaining comprehensive catastrophic coverage through state exchanges or elsewhere. ...
