Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Yesterday, we looked at a case in which a brand-new agricultural worker fell off a high ladder, sustaining both physical and psychiatric injuries. Normally a worker has to be with an employer for at least six months to recover for psychiatric injuries—what did the court conclude in this case?
With the Supreme Court’s June 28 ruling affirming health reform, its legal requirements on employer health plans are a green light. Plans therefore continue to face important requirements this calendar year. Fortunately, they’re the same ones employers have known about for some time. But if an employer has been holding off from comprehensive implementation, a […]
Expressing strong concerns about health reform’s negative impact on health costs and people’s ability to choose health care options, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., set a July 11 date for the House of Representatives to vote on legislation that would repeal the health care reform law. He said health reform is precluding people from […]
Employers may not have to adjust their qualified transportation fringe benefit programs after all — at least not just yet. A legislative provision that would have affected QTFBs by boosting the mass transit exclusion to the same level as that for qualified parking — the so-called “mass transit parity” provision — did not make it […]
Employers that offer qualified transportation benefits should be aware that they may soon need to adjust their plans. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are setting the stage for the possible passage of a two-year federal highway funding law that could include a transit parity provision — which would return the mass transit exclusion to parity with […]
The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on June 28 to uphold nearly all provisions of President Obama’s health-reform law removes any excuse for employers to drag their feet implementing reform-driven changes to their health plans. Uncertainty on whether the law still would be binding on plans was hindering implementation, many sources say, but with the […]
The health care reform law was upheld today in the U.S. Supreme Court, which concluded that the controversial individual mandate is a tax and therefore falls into Congressional authority in the Taxing Clause of the Constitution. Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling was based on logic that was not the key focus of in oral arguments last […]
Voters in Washington state and Maryland will weigh in on whether same-sex marriage should be legal in their states. Employers in these states — as well as those in adjacent states where same-sex marriage is not legal — would be wise to monitor developments and use the upcoming months to prepare for any possible changes […]
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on June 25 to decide whether an employee health plan is subject to equitable limits when it demands reimbursement of benefits paid to care for a covered employee who also recovers money from third parties. A 2011 ruling on this issue by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals troubled […]
We recently received the following question from a California Employer Advisor subscriber: We have a policy we’re planning to change. We told the affected employees that we will be handling the issue a particular way, but we didn’t explicitly tell them that the new practice is contrary to what is in the handbook, or that […]