Bipartisan bill seeks stand-alone telehealth for all workers 

The coming end of the national emergencies connected to the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11 sets a ticking clock for Congress to address a host of expiring flexibilities for employer health care plans, including the ability to offer stand-alone telehealth benefits to employees not eligible for other employer coverage.

In a promising development for employers, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers has reintroduced legislation – the Telehealth Benefit Expansion for Workers Act of 2023 (HR 824) – that would expand and make permanent the current pandemic-related relief for stand-alone telehealth.

The current policy treats telehealth and remote care services like an excepted benefit, eliminating the need for the coverage to comply with many ERISA and Affordable Care Act (ACA) group health plan mandates (e.g., first-dollar coverage of ACA-mandated preventive care). This temporary policy is tied to the public health emergency (PHE) and allows employers to offer telehealth arrangements to benefits-ineligible employees like part-time or seasonal workers.

Unlike the current temporary policy, the Telehealth Benefit Expansion for Workers Act would let all employers offer excepted-benefit stand-alone telehealth arrangements to all employees (including benefit-eligible optouts), not just those ineligible for benefits. Mercer will continue to work with the plan sponsor community in urging Congress to pass this bill before the end of the public health emergency.

Recently enacted legislation provided a two-year extension of COVID-19 telehealth relief for health savings account (HSA)-qualifying high-deductible health plans (HDHPs). The relief maintains the flexibility for HSA-qualifying HDHPs to cover telehealth and other remote care services on a predeductible basis. This important relief is not tied to either the PHE or national emergency and will expire on Dec. 31, 2024, for calendar-year plans (later for noncalendar-year plans).