The “automatic enrollment” provision of the Affordable Care Act, never enforced, has been repealed under the budget deal hammered out between Congress and the White House and signed into law by President Obama.
The repeal was widely supported by employers. Accomplished via a two-sentence paragraph halfway through the 15-page law, it became effective immediately with Obama’s signature.
As written in the 2010 ACA legislation, the provision required employers with more than 200 full-time employees to automatically enroll new full-time employees in a company-sponsored health insurance plan and to automatically continue the enrollment of current employees.
However, federal regulators delayed enforcement of the automatic enrollment requirement until formal regulations were issued. Apparently this was not a priority for the IRS and the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, because the regulations were never issued.
Employers are free to establish automatic enrollment programs if they wish to do so; the repeal simply means they are not required to do so.