Sixty-seven months ago, Congress ordered employers of 200 or more full-time employees to switch from opt-in to opt-out enrollment. See 29 U.S.C. § 218a. But the enforcement agencies could not write a rule that did more good than harm, so they gave up. A lame duck Senator killed a bipartisan repeal bill in his committee last year. The new Republican majority saw this as easy picking. And so it was. President Obama’s November 2 signature on H.R. 1314 made it official. Here’s the entire text of § 604 of H.R. 1314: “The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C. 201 et seq.) is amended by repealing section 18A (as added by section 1511 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111–148)).”
“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” Getting rid of what few want enforced should be a mundane, bipartisan project. We’ve still not seen draft rules forbidding fully-insured plans to discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees – another regulatory quandary, obviously. And we’ve all heard the bipartisan calls for and campaign pledges of Cadillac plan tax repeal. Even for some things not dead yet, there may be funerals in the near future.
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