Mike Lillis
The Hill
6/14/2010
The White House on Monday outlined broad new rules designed to prevent employers from dropping health insurance benefits for their workers or shifting huge new costs onto them.
The regulations empower the administration to revoke the so-called grandfather status of businesses that shift “significant” new burdens onto employees — a considerable penalty that would subject those plans to all the consumer protections in the Democrats’ new healthcare reform law…
…The new rules say that employers can make “routine and modest” adjustments to their premium, deductible and co-pay requirements, Sebelius said, but “significant” cost hikes or benefit cuts would cost them their exempted status. The goal is to ensure that grandfathered plans “don’t use this additional flexibility to take advantage of their customers,” she said.
“We don’t want a massive shift of cost to employees,” Sebelius said…
