Companies Which Self Insure For Employee Health Care – Can They Ask Specific Questions in Hiring?
In the “ObamaCare” Health Care Reform Law there is a section in there for very large companies and corporations who wish to self-insure for their employees health care plan. This sounds like an awfully hard thing to do for a Corporation to become their own health care insurance provider, but in reality it makes a lot of sense for a very large Corporation with tens of thousands of employees. They can pool their resources together and run their own insurance company, and it can become a profit center.
In California healthcare insurance companies are much like utilities in that they can only charge 30% more than they can prove they are spending on the actual healthcare costs. If we look at a self-insuring corporations for employee health care, we can see that a 30% margin is more than enough to justify setting up another profit center. However, insurance companies are allowed to ask people all kinds of things before they insure them, or assign them to a risk category.
A large Corporation which self insurers will need to ask the same questions upon hiring the individual, and it could become a reason for hiring in the first place. Some of these questions are actually against current employment laws, and that gets into a gray area of law with the human resource department. There are specific questions that no company is allowed to ask due to discrimination laws. Things like age, race, marital status, etc. – and if a human resource person asks these questions, it is possible that the applying potential future employee can sue the company if they’re not hired or let go right after they are hired.
If the company self insurers they have to ask these questions. But does that mean that the company can only ask the questions after the person is hired? And if so their so-called self insuring corporate profit center must take all the employees regardless of any of these facts. This is one of the underlining themes of ObamaCare in that an insurance company may not deny coverage for pre-existing health issues. Instead, they have to offer the health care insurance and put them into one of those high risk category pools.
Nevertheless, they still have to ask the questions. And yet an employer is not allowed to ask these questions if they self-insure, and therefore our legislature has created the law of unintended consequences, created a new gray area of law, for which no case law actually exists yet. Had they considered this prior to completing the bill, this wouldn’t have happened. Please consider all this.