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 The move from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission aims to
clear up confusion over the way two federal laws protecting
employees' medical privacy apply to the popular programs, which are
designed to control medical spending by reducing obesity, smoking
and other risk factors.
The rules, which were first proposed in November, mark a compromise
with U.S. businesses that opposed the EEOC's previous stance that
providing incentives for voluntary wellness programs rendered them
involuntary, and thus illegal.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act allowed U.S. employers to increase the
rewards they offer to employees who participate in wellness
programs. But in a series of 2013 lawsuits against companies,
including Honeywell International Inc, the EEOC said requests for
medical information related to incentive-based wellness programs
violated the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Genetic
Information Nondiscrimination Act.
Under the new rules, incentives for wellness programs are open only
to employees, not their families, and are capped at 30 percent of
the cheapest individual health insurance premium offered through the
employer.
The new rules are more restrictive than those passed under the ACA,
which allowed incentives of up to 30 percent of the actual cost of
an employee's insurance plan and 50 percent for programs approved by
the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Labor and the
Department of Health and Human Services. Only smoking-cessation
programs received that approval.
Senator Lamar Alexander (R.-Tennessee), chair of the Senate's
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said he would
push legislation, along with House Republicans, to reverse the
rules.
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The National Business Group on Health, a non-profit organization
advocating for large healthcare employers, said that although it
would have "hoped for some additional flexibility... the rules do
what the EEOC was asked to do."
Some health and workers' rights groups say the rules, which take
effect next year, penalize employees who decline to join wellness
programs and hand over private medical information.
Maxwell Mehlman, a professor at Case Western Reserve University
School of Law, said lower-income employees could be unduly pressured
to join wellness programs.
"It's hard to say that that's a voluntary program for a lot of
people," he said.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Additional
reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Alexia
Garamfalvi and Dan Grebler)
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