Articles by Girish Anand

President Trump may be beating the drum to end the Obamacare individual mandate with looming tax reform legislation (to little avail so far), but the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is already gearing up to enforce both that mandate and the employer shared responsibility mandate for businesses with 50 or more employees. The IRS will ...

Peter Robb, new NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb has been confirmed as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), becoming the gatekeeper who decides which cases the board hears. Pro-business attorney Robb replaces Richard Griffith, a pro-labor Obama appointee whose term expired with the witching hour on ...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) made significant progress in managing the pending inventory of charges in fiscal year 2017, the agency reports. EEOC says its offices deployed new strategies to more efficiently prioritize charges with merit and more quickly resolve investigations once the agency had sufficient information.  Together with improvements in the agency's digital s...

In week one of Open Enrollment for 2018, 601,462 people selected plans using the HealthCare.gov platform. As in past years, enrollment weeks are measured Sunday through Saturday. Consequently, week one was only four days long this year -- from Wednesday to Saturday, Nov 1-4. Every week during Open Enrollment, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will release enrollment snapshot...

Health insurance giant Humana is cutting 1,300 positions, offering early retirement to another 1,150 employees and suing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for breach of contract over the Obamacare risk corridor provision, as it exits from offering insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Humana currently offers Obamacare policies in 156 counties in 11 states, but is dropp...

On the first day of open enrollment for Obamacare health insurance policies -- Nov. 1 -- some 200,000 people signed up on HealthCare.gov, double the number from 2016, according to reports in various media sources including The Hill and The Washington Post. In addition, some 1 million visited the website, up from 750,000 a year earlier. ...

The Department of Labor (DOL) has released its Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2018-2022 with an emphasis on "jobs, more jobs and even more jobs," in the words of Secretary Alexander Acosta. Labor Secretary Acosta[/caption] In his "Secretary's Message" prefacing the document, Acosta writes: "Our nation’s greatest resource is the A...

The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a Clinton-era initiative that ran out of funds on Sept. 31, has been reauthorized by a 242-174 vote in the House of Representatives, but now faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, where some of the bill's provisions are viewed askance. The reason for resistance by some senators: The bill creates higher Medicare premiums for people who earn more t...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a report "on qualified health plans (QHPs) available in the Exchange for states that use the HealthCare.gov platform, including estimates for issuer participation, health plan options, premiums, and subsidies in the upcoming open enrollment period (OEP), and trends since the first OEP." ...

Today (Nov 1., 2017) the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched an EEOC Public Portal to provide online access to individuals inquiring about discrimination. "This secure online system makes the EEOC and an individual's charge information available wherever and whenever it is most convenient for that individual," said EEOC Acting Chair Victoria A. Lipnic. "It's a giant leap fo...