Longtime legal counsel to Relph Benefit Advisors on ERISA employee benefit plan issues, Peter J. Marathas, Jr., from the Boston office of Proskauer Rose, has a special advantage being from Massachusetts and having advised numerous clients on the Massachusetts Health Care Reform—which is considered to be a model for the new Federal bill.

 

Although this process of adapting to all the many and varied requirements of the new Healthcare Reform legislation will no doubt be time consuming and thorny, it is a comfort to know that we are stepping through it with the guidance and advice of an individual as well as a team that are eminently qualified and uniquely experienced.

 

See the article below about Peter and the preparations he and his firm have made in order to deal with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

 

 

 

Posted by Brian Baxter

 

With the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 a reality, law firms are busy trying to figure out how clients can best use their services when crafting corporate health care plans that comply with the new legislation.

 

Proskauer Rose employee benefits partner Peter Marathas, Jr., for instance, has been traveling the I-95 corridor from Boston to New York and back a lot lately, meeting with clients thinking about making changes to their employee benefits plans.

 

Says Marathas: "This is obviously a big shift and there's not an employer in the country that this won't have an impact on."

 

Previous experience advising clients on Massachusetts's version of health reform—considered the model for the new federal bill—gives the Boston-based Marathas something of an edge over his competitors.

 

"All of the component parts of the Massachusetts model—such as the individual and employer mandates—are what we've been dealing with in Massachusetts since 2006," he says.

 

Many components of the federal bill don't go into effect until 2014, meaning employers won't have to worry about complying with all of the legislation's provisions immediately. But, Marathas says, certain clients will to deal with some immediate changes, such as a ban on lifetime limits for fully insured and self-insured health care plans.

 

"These things will be cost-drivers, and clients need to thing about design changes [to their health care plans] to counteract the rate increases that will come from that," Marathas says. "Other immediate and significant changes are the increase of the dependent age to 26 and no preexisting conditions for children up to the age of 18. Plan designs will have to change because of this."

 

Unfortunately, he says, the federal legislation doesn't provide much guidance for lawyers in some areas.

 

In fact, Marathas calls the bill "one of the most poorly drafted pieces of legislation" he has encountered in his 16-year legal career.

 

"I'm not trying to score a political point," he says. "But the reason for it is [Congress] used reconciliation. Instead of finding consensus on areas that they disagree, which is what normally happens when passing a bill, we don't have any of the usual committee reports that are reliable."

 

Marathas hopes that in the coming months federal agencies will draft answers to questions posed by lawyers looking to advise their clients on the bill's particulars. In the interim, Marathas and other members of Proskauer's health care reform task force are asking employers to live by the adage: "Don't just do something. Stand there."

 

Marathas says that means advising clients to forego making decisions until they have all the facts. Some of Proskauer's largest clients are Benefit Advisors Network and HR Benefit Advisors— a national consortium of 40 brokers—that have their own clients looking for answers to employee benefits questions. Marathas says that online presentations the firm hosted for both groups in the wake of the bill's passage were at capacity. (Proskauer is also the referral firm for Assurant Health Insurance's stable of brokers.)

 

Proskauer has 65 employee benefits lawyers across the country, Marathas says; about 10 in the group deal with health care issue. The firm began bolstering its bench in the field last year when it hired a group of employee benefits partners—including local practice leader Paul Hamburger—from McDermott Will & Emery in Washington, D.C.