NCOIL chief to feds: Your regs ban exchange HSAs

Federal regulators should act now to save public exchange plan users’ access to health savings accounts (HSA), Thomas Considine says.

Considine is a former New Jersey insurance commissoner and the current chief executive officer of the National Conference of Insurance Legislators (NCOIL). 

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and its parent, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently published a regulation that sets new limits for deductibles and annual out-of-pocket spending maximums for the qualified health plans (QHPs) sold through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) public exchange system.

Considine says, in a letter written on behalf of NCOIL, that the new HHS regulation clashes with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) out-of-pocket cost rules for HSAs.

The new HHS regulation “will effectively eliminate HSA qualified health plans from the insurance exchanges next year,” Considine writes in the NCOIL letter.

In some cases, the new HHS rules would lead to deductibles that are too high for HSA users, and, in other cases, the rules would lead to deductibles that are too low, Considine writes.

“NCOIL urges that HHS and CMS adopt a solution that will keep HSAs in the marketplace,” Considine says.