As many employers navigate their first months of compliance with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, it could be assumed that employees are enjoying the quiet before the storm – patients taking advantage of “free” preventive care visits to help offset a necessary bump to copays and other cost-sharing items, and parents enjoying the opportunity to cover their “late-bloomer” children until age 26.

Truly, most of PPACA’s early requirements were exceptionally employee friendly. Although I’ll never gain a reputation for being a cheerleader for PPACA, I certainly used it to my advantage at those October open enrollment meetings to couch the bad news regarding necessary cost-sharing hikes for the coming plan year.
But there’s one nagging change that is less than employee friendly, and some might even consider it an ominous foreshadow of things to come.

If the nation’s health care retailers enjoyed any significant success in the first fiscal quarter of 2011 (last calendar quarter of 2010), it could be directly attributed to flexible spending account participants visiting local drug stores in droves to buy nonprescription over-the-counter medicines with their 2010 FSA dollars while they still could.
PPACA’s first takeaway that will directly affect employees is the end to tax-favored FSA reimbursements for nonprescribed OTC medicines and drugs. These new limitations also will apply to health reimbursement arrangements, medical savings accounts and health savings accounts in 2011.