Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

Part of my first-year's learning in Senior Living has been discovering that some communities, even with small workforces, have special benefits for their management teams.  This will become problematic and potentially cause employers to pay penalties once the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.  Since most plans are based upon the calendar year and have renewed for 2014 now is the time to plan and communicate a discontinuation of those plan options. The regulations have not yet been written and so implementation is delayed: this gives employers time to eliminate those plans for 2015. Section 2716 of the Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination based upon salary in the provision of benefits under a pre-tax benefits plan. In layman's terms, your highly compensated management cannot receive better benefits than the rest of your employees and your plan still enjoy pre-tax status.  For the definition of "highly compensated employee" the government could have ...

The withering criticism of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") has led many to believe that it is a disaster, that it will never work, etc...  If you only watch conservative television or listen to conservative talk radio and politicians then you might be convinced of this "fact".  Best to hang on for a moment. One of the criticisms is that "nobody is signing up" as often-reported on Fox News which is omnipresent in the YMCA where I work out.  Early in the enrollment process there were daily reports of "single digit" enrollments in some states.  This was due to the HHS software being as bad at reporting as it was at enrolling. The software bugs are being fixed and enrollments are happening, and this week no more conservative voice than The Washington Post reports that HHS may actually meet their first enrollment goal of 7 million enrollees for 2014.  If that target is attained, given the large amount of negative publicity, the daily rants ...