Dive Brief:
- A proposed rule released last week from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would allow employers offering voluntary wellness programs with their group health plans to provide incentives in exchange for health information, including some genetic details, about the employee and their spouse.
- The rule would amend the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, which also relates to employers seeking health information about employees' covered spouses.
- The EEOC says it is “mindful that this change creates an exception to the general rule that no incentives may be provided for an employee’s genetic information." As a result, the agency says it has interpreted the exception as narrowly as possible and it has explicitly excluded the seeking of genetic information about an employee's children.
Dive Insight:
The news for employers and insurers is the proposal would allow financial incentives for employee participation be set as high as 30% of the cost of a family health plan, whereas an earlier EEOC rule limited the 30% to the cost of employee-only coverage.
As Kaiser Health News notes, employers had sought such permission to connect incentives to family coverage costs under the argument that it
Employers had pushed for the ability to tie incentives to the cost of family coverage.
Comments are being sought for 60 days, particularly on questions of whether to address protection of personal health information and whether to prohibt wellness programs from obtaining genetic information from claims data and medical records.