The U.S. Capitol rotunda. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM
The leader of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is ramping up efforts to increase benefits portability by decreasing the chances that workers who get benefits from companies will be classified as the companies' employees.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the Senate HELP Chairman, posted a paper Wednesday that sketches out proposals for making it easier for freelancers, gig workers and other types of independent workers to keep their health insurance and other benefits throughout their careers.
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One proposal calls for Congress to create a "safe harbor" that would cut questions related to health benefits access out of the test for determining whether an individual is a company's employee.
Cassidy gave the new employee classification laws in Tennessee and Utah as examples for Congress to think about.
Congress should also make it easier for independent workers to join association health plans, or programs that let individuals and employers team up to buy health coverage, according to the paper.
"Modernizing labor and employment laws will allow independent workers to receive benefits without disrupting the traditional employment model," Cassidy said.
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Cassidy has been talking about the need to increase benefits portability for years. He listed increasing portability as a priority in January at a Senate HELP organizational meeting.
Some of the strongest supporters of benefits portability have been gig worker platforms like DoorDash and benefits platform companies like Stride.
Cassidy's new portability proposals face strong opposition from the AFL-CIO and other labor groups.
Labor groups have backed rules that limit employers' efforts to classify workers as independent contractors, because of a belief that companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash use workers' independent contractor status to evade federal and state labor rights laws and employee benefits requirements.
The backgrounds of members of the Trump administration benefits-policy-shaping team could affect the debate going forward.
In the past, many top administration officials had spent most of their adult lives working in Congress, state legislatures, state or federal agencies, big law firms or big corporations. They may have had little personal experience with independent workers.
Now, the new Labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is someone who likely encountered many different kinds of independent workers, including travel nurses and physicians with "locum tenens" positions, through her husband's anesthesiology practice.
The administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is now Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon and former TV talk show host.
As the head of the company that made "The Dr. Oz Show," Oz may have worked with a mix of employees in multiemployer health plans, people who worked regularly for the production but wanted to keep independent contractor status, and outright freelancers.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
