Employer’s Notice On ACA Marketplace

By tfbuser on September 19, 2013 | Listed under Heathcare Reform | Leave a comment |

Employers have been asked by the DOL to provide a notice to all employees about health insurance. The DOL released this information in May 2013. That is to say if your company offers a group health insurance plan you should send out one type notice. If you do NOT offer health insurance you should send another (similar) notice to your employees.

The DOL web site indicates that there is no penalty for not providing or sending a notice to your employees but as formality and to keep up we encourage all our clients and all employers to strive to give proper notice.

These notices (the samples from the DOL website look very similar) have one big thing in common. Namely they inform people about the new Marketplace (original name Exchange) where people can shop for the new metallic labeled plans. The Marketplace is due to be up 10/01/2013 to help people shop for health insurance that will go into effect starting 01/01/2014.

There will be two types of marketplace.

(A) A public or government approved marketplace where you can shop and buy health insurance and if applicable receive a government subsidy on your premium for the coverage. (Tool for checking eligibility for the subsidy)

See – Money Magazine article on the topice of ACA subsidies.

(B) A private marketplace where you can shop and buy health insurance. This should have the metallic labeled plans like the public exchange will have and any other plans available for sale in the market. A private marketplace is similar to what people have online today, in September of 2013 (see our health quote tool at Get A Quote) where you can purchase coverage, pre-marketplace.

We plan on being active with the new marketplace when it becomes available.

Like health insurance agents all over the USA, we are going through the education process to become certified to work with the marketplace due to go live on October 1st 2013 (10/01/2013).

DOL info on employer’s notice guidelines that should be available to employees, 10/01/2013.

The Department of Labor (DOL) has some information on this hot topic.

We are working with our Group Insurance carriers to get this pinned down so we can advise our Group Clients with guidelines to give employees proper notice on the Marketplace. This will be new as part of the ACA or Affordable Care Act that will go into effect 01/01/2014.

The Government website has a short interactive tool for people to use. Insurance professionals are still working and learning about ALL of this.

Here is the link to Healthcare.gov titled Quick Answers. Please feel free to contact our office by telephone or email if you have any additional questions.