Protecting Affordable Health Care for Workers and Families
WASHINGTON, D.C.,
April 5, 2017
Affordable health care continues to be a top concern for families and small business owners. For employers, popular options like self-insurance are essential to providing their workers access to high-quality care at an affordable cost.
Affordable health care continues to be a top concern for families and small business owners. For employers, popular options like self-insurance are essential to providing workers access to high-quality care at an affordable cost. Over the past 22 years, our self-funded arrangement has allowed the utility to maintain above average benefits for our employees, dependents, and eligible retirees… These benefits are provided without the employees contributing to the cost of health insurance through their paycheck or otherwise. Furthermore, eligible early retirees and their dependents enjoy the same benefits as active employees. You’re probably asking yourself, “Okay, sounds great. What’s the problem?” The Obama administration is investigating the use of stop-loss insurance by employers with healthier employees, and officials said they were considering regulations to discourage small and midsize employers from using such arrangements to circumvent the new health care law. There you have it: To protect Obamacare, the Obama administration wanted to restrict access to a health insurance model enjoyed by tens of millions of Americans. Today, nearly 100 million Americans receive health benefits through various forms of self-insured plans. Self-insurance is one segment of the market that works particularly well for both plan sponsors and plan participants. We believe it is necessary to act to preserve choice when it comes to offering health benefits to workers, and to prevent arbitrary limitations placed on self-insured group health plans through the regulation of stop-loss insurance. The Self-Insurance Protection Act would do just that by:
Preventing federal regulators from limiting self-insured plans is just one step we can take to promote more choices in health care and ensure America’s workers have access to the affordable health care coverage they need. # # # |