Weekend Update

The House of Representatives and the Senate return to work on Capitol Hill tomorrow. The Hill reports that

Lawmakers are returning to Washington on Monday, and they’ll have 16 working days to reach a deal to fund the government by Oct. 1 or pass a spending patch to kick the fight closer to the holidays. 

But the House and Senate are coming back to town with plans to move forward on different tracks. House Democrats are focused on passing a continuing resolution (CR), while Senate Republicans are set to make a late start at moving fiscal 2020 bills. 

The Senate executive calendar informs us that

at 5:30 p.m, notwithstanding the provisions of Rule XXII, the cloture motions on the following nominations ripen: * * *

Dale Cabaniss, of Virginia, to be Director of the Office of Personnel Management for a term of four years;

To recap, on August 1, the Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell "presented a cloture motion that is signed by 16 Senators, proposing “to bring to a close the debate upon” the pending question", to wit, Ms. Cabaniss's nomination." As far as the FEHBlog can tell from this Congressional Research Service report, the Senate will vote on the Cabaniss nomination cloture motion tomorrow evening.  According to Linked In,  Ms Cabaniss served most recently as Chair of the Federal Labor Relatoins Authority and Republican Staff Director of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Financial Services and General Government subcommittee.

Last week the ACA regulators issued the final version of ACA FAQ Part 39 which concerns the non-quantitative treatment limitation provisions of the federal mental health parity law. The ACA regulators issued the draft FAQs in April 2018 and discussed the draft FAQs with stakeholders in January 2019. The ACA regulators explain that

These FAQs are designed to help people understand the law and benefit from it as intended through examples that illustrate the requirements of MHPAEA and its implementing regulations. While some of the fact patterns used as examples may be relatively uncomplicated, they should enable the public to identify and address important MHPAEA issues. These FAQs do not contain any new interpretations of MHPAEA, but instead provide additional examples of how the MHPAEA final regulations apply to different fact patterns to promote compliance.

It's important for health plans to read and understand these FAQs because the NQTL rules are not intuitive.

Together with the FAQs the ACA regulators released a final model disclosure request form (p. 16) that can be used to request information from group health plans and health insurance issuers offering group or individual health insurance coverage, including FEHB plans.

The FEHBlog's wife highly recommends reading the New York Times Diagnosis column or each the Netflix show.