Obama Administration Releases Rules on Wellness Programs
By REUTERS
MAY 16, 2016, 6:06 P.M. E.D.T.
(Reuters)
- A federal agency on Monday released final rules on how employers can offer
workers financial incentives of up to 30 percent of the cost of their cheapest
health insurance plans to participate in wellness programs without violating
federal laws protecting the confidentiality of medical information.
The
move from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission aims to clear up confusion
over the way two federal laws protecting employees' medical privacy apply to the
popular programs, which are designed to control medical spending by reducing
obesity, smoking and other risk factors.
The
rules, which were first proposed in November, mark a compromise with U.S.
businesses that opposed the EEOC's previous stance that providing incentives for
voluntary wellness programs rendered them involuntary, and thus illegal.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act allowed U.S. employers to
increase the rewards they offer to employees who participate in wellness
programs. But in a series of 2013 lawsuits against companies, including
Honeywell International Inc, the EEOC said requests for medical information
related to incentive-based wellness programs violated the Americans with
Disabilities Act or the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.
Under the new rules, incentives for wellness programs are
open only to employees, not their families, and are capped at 30 percent of the
cheapest individual health insurance premium offered through the employer.
The new rules are more restrictive
than those passed under the ACA, which allowed incentives of up to 30 percent of
the actual cost of an employee's insurance plan and 50 percent for programs
approved by the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor and the
Department of Health and Human Services. Only smoking-cessation programs
received that approval.
Senator Lamar Alexander (R.-Tennessee), chair of the
Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said he would push
legislation, along with House Republicans, to reverse the rules.
The National Business Group on Health, a non-profit
organization advocating for large healthcare employers, said that although it
would have "hoped for some additional flexibility... the rules do what the EEOC
was asked to do."
Some health and workers' rights groups say the rules,
which take effect next year, penalize employees who decline to join wellness
programs and hand over private medical information.
Maxwell Mehlman, a professor at Case Western Reserve
University School of Law, said lower-income employees could be unduly pressured
to join wellness programs.
"It's hard to say that that's a voluntary program for a lot
of people," he said.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York;
Additional reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Alexia
Garamfalvi and Dan Grebler)