Articles by WorkWise Compliance team

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell announced today that she expects 10 million individuals to be enrolled in coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplaces and paying their premiums –- so-called effectuated coverage -– at the close of 2016. As part of that goal, HHS believes more than 1 out of every 4 uninsured Marketplace-eligible consumers will select plans durin...

Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian ruled this week in a four-page opinion that Uber drivers are employees and not independent contractors. “Oregon’s worker protections are in place for a reason,” Avakian wrote in a statement. “When corporations misclassify an employee, the worker is denied basic protections such as the right to be paid on time and in full. It also creates an unfair playing...

St. Louis tried to hike its minimum wage from the state-mandated $7.65 an hour to $8.25 an hour, but it ran afoul of a recently passed state law barring municipalities from setting their own minimum wage. This week Judge Steven Ohmer of the St. Louis Circuit Court, responding to a legal challenge by local business groups, voided the increase based on the statewide ban on municipalities. If ...

The U.S. Department of Labor has announced a Final Rule on the employment of foreign workers in jobs related to the herding of livestock on the range, including the herding of sheep and goats. The regulation, the H-2A Herder Final Rule, implements a methodology to address wage stagnation and prevent adverse effects on U.S. workers. The rule brings the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to t...

Under terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the official definition of small group for health insurance purposes was set to rise from 50 to 100 employees in 2016, but a bipartisan effort by Congress -- along with a president's signature -- has repealed that provision. The vote for the Protecting Affordable Coverage for Employees (PACE) Act was overwhelmingly in favor on both sides of the ais...

Testifying before Congress, David Michaels, chief of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), said his agency is so underfunded that it can inspect each American business only once every 140 years. Facing a further 7 percent reduction in the OSHA budget, Michaels noted: “The fewer inspections we do, the more injuries are going to occur, and the more costs are going to go up, ...

Shortly after receiving an appeal from the Home Care Association of America about the rule from the Department of Labor (DOL) extending overtime and minimum wage protections to home care workers associated with third-party employers, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts said no. Not only did he say no, but he said it with no explanation. Thus the ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals validat...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) thave released final rules that simplify requirements and add new flexibilities for providers to make electronic health information available when and where it matters most and for health care providers and consumers to be able to readily, safely, and securely ex...

Following a decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals validating a Department of Labor (DOL) rule extending minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers, the agency said it would begin enforcing the ruling 30 days after it becomes official, on Nov. 12, 2015. (The court ruling itself becomes effective on Oct. 13.) The rule applies only to home care workers employed by third-pa...

Section 1332 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) allows states to obtain waivers to tinker with provisions of Obamacare beginning in 2017. Depending on how much leeway the federal government will allow, states could drop the individual mandate or employer shared responsibility provision, or as Vermont unsuccessfully tried to do, establish a single-payer health care system...