Here at work we are being asked to provide proof that any dependents covered by the company health insurance really are our dependents. A coworker mentioned that her husband was asked to do the same thing by his employer. She claims this is a trickle down effect of Obamacare. Is there any truth to that?
That’s been the rule at my company for at least six or seven years–they say it is “IRS regulations.”
I don’t think it has anything to do with Obamacare. My employer does this periodically to reduce fraud.
Yeah, that would seem to be an employer decision. They’re paying a percentage of your dependents’ insurance costs so they want to be sure that they are actually your dependents and that they should actually be paying for them.
Anyway, even if it was an effect of the ACA, I don’t see where it’s any real burden to show that your spouse/children are, in fact, your spouse/children.
Here in Canada - Blue Cross requested a “census” from our company to validate all dependents more than 10 years ago. It’s a regular thing - we had generous dental and especially prescription benefits (all the “extras” since basic medical is covered by government). There were stories about guys whose divorce settlement included that the benefits stay covering the ex-wife.
The sheet we received required us to sign that the spouse/dependents fit in the correct category (wife or common law living in same house, children under 18 or students attending post-secondary full time). The warning was that claiming benefits for unqualified persons would constitute fraud, as well as we could be required to pay back any benefits paid.
So I would suggest it’s a routine audit. The only contribution AHCA might do, is that now that the profits restriction is in place (X% of premiums must be spent on health care) maybe the companies are paying more attention to limiting payouts to ineligible “dependents”.
No, not Obamacare. It’s been done at both my and my hubby’s jobs on occasion.
You do realize that the phrase “Thanks Obama” has become pretty much of a joke because the right has over used it in blaming Obama for everything. Ninety six people got shot in Chicago last weekend, thanks Obama for not letting citizens carry high capacity clips in their assault rifles so that they could defend themselves!
You mean, there is a new meme, blaming Obama for everything?
Well, thanks, Obama!
Even if this were mandated by Obamacare, do you (or your colleague) really think that the President got down to this detail in the law. Anything like this would have been the result of Congressional action.
I realize that, which is why I used it in the title. My colleague is highly religious and had made several comments about different insurance issues being due to Obamacare. I didn’t buy it, but I didn’t argue. My guess is that she really doesn’t like Obama and is just blaming these things on Obamacare because, well, because. The phrase seemed to fit her attitude about Obamacare.
[QUOTE=OldGuy]
Even if this were mandated by Obamacare, do you (or your colleague) really think that the President got down to this detail in the law. Anything like this would have been the result of Congressional action.
[/QUOTE]
No, I never thought this had anything to do with ACA. But since Obama’s name is fully plastered across this legislation, for better or worse, any ramifications will be attributed to him. The same could be said for Bush and ADA and any number of other legislation. Some of these things are pushed through by various presidencies and while they don’t own the details, they are associated with it.
Lots of employers have been blaming things on Obamacare, because their employees aren’t going to wade through 2,300 pages of legislation or even more implementing regulations to check.
Eligibility audits are a function of the general rise in health insurance costs, not the ACA. A similar phenomenon is the spousal carve-out, where employers are denying coverage to spouses if the spouse has health insurance available via his/her own employer. Again, not related to the ACA, just a cost-cutting measure.
I caught my parents’ insurance company doing something similar before they signed up on the healthcare site. They blamed some kind of proposed rate increase on the ACA. When I looked at it more closely, it was basically their normal, periodic increase (actually a bit less than in previous years) but they were shifting the blame for it onto the legislation.
It should be noted that in this particular case the claim being made is not that it’s some requirement somewhere in the “2,300 pages of legislation or even more implementing regulations”. Rather, that it’s a “trickle down effect”, meaning an indirect outcome of the law.
There are a lot of effects of the ACA which were not directly written into the law but which were indirectly the result of it, some of which were very predictable and some of which were not.
To the extent that one can attribute an increase in dependent audits to the ACA, the likeliest culprit would be the requirement that children be insured through age 26. This created an increased cost for employers, and one that they can mitigate to an extent by auditing dependent eligibility.
A smaller but possible factor is that the definition of “affordable coverage” that employers are required to provide under the ACA is based on the affordability of individual coverage only - dependent coverage does not have to be affordable. So employers have been shifting the company subsidies from dependents to employees. Due to the principle of anti-selection, this would tend to make dependents cost more (even gross of contributions) than previously (since on average the dependents willing to pay higher contributions will tend to be worse than the health of those willing to pay lower ones), which would make the dependent audits more cost effective.
There could be other impacts, but these are what occur offhand.
Sure, but the fact is that these dependent audits predate Obamacare by a considerable period. You raise a good point about the age eligibility increase, though - employers are probably less likely to take an employee’s word for it about whether a 24-year-old is actually dependent versus, say, a 12-year-old.
Of course. But the question is whether there’s been an increase as a result of Obamacare.
I read the OP as asking whether they are happening because of Obamacare, rather than whether they are happening more.
The quote from Jenna Marbles:
My employer did one of these audits years before Obamacare. I had to provide copies of my children’s birth certificates , a copy of the joint tax return my husband and I filed ( with financial info blacked out) to prove we hadn’t gotten divorced since I was hired , proof of college enrollment. Becasue even a small percentage of fraud in a large group like mine still comes to a lot of money and it of course turned out that people were covering their ex-spouses , former stepchildren and children over 19 who were not in college.
Under the ACA the under-26 year old doesn’t have to actually be a dependent , so that issue wouldn’t increase audits. There might be a distant connection between the ACA and audits in that as more adult children are covered, there are likely to be numerically more cases of fraud ( former stepchildren etc) and now that plans are no longer concerned about verifying college attendance ( which mine used to do every semester) they can focus on the other issues.
They have to actually be your child, so it would.
I heard it was only 2,000 pages. They added 300 more!? Thanks, Obama!! 