On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law two pieces of legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (these will be referred to collectively as “the Act”), which collectively impose significant new compliance obligations on employers maintaining group health plans.1 This Alert focuses on certain provisions of the Act that apply to group health plans maintained by large employers and that require action in 2010 and 2011.

The Act provides that many existing group health plans are “grandfathered,” while others are not; grandfathered plans are subject to only a subset of the requirements imposed by the Act while non-grandfathered plans are subject to the full range of requirements, as discussed below. In this Alert, we focus on how a plan may lose or retain grandfathered status and the consequences of each of these alternatives.