A provision of the Affordable Care Act allows states, beginning in January 2017, to ask the federal government to waive almost every major coverage requirement of the ACA, including benefit package stipulations and the individual and employer mandates. Many in the employer community and the benefit industry hoping to be relieved from the ACA’s Employer Shared Responsibility Rule may consider state waivers the elixir they’ve been waiting for, but are they?
While the ACA itself still permits a state to apply for a State Innovation Waiver requesting the employer mandate rule or other cumbersome coverage requirements be waived, recent guidance makes it clear those requests will be hard to win.
