The Wall Street Journal had an interesting and important piece on how employers, especially those with lower-earning workforces, are looking to provide coverage in order to comply with the Affordable Care Act.

Here are some of the details of what companies are considering:

Employers are increasingly recognizing they may be able to avoid certain penalties under the federal health law by offering very limited plans that can lack key benefits such as hospital coverage.

Benefits advisers and insurance brokers—bucking a commonly held expectation that the law would broadly enrich benefits—are pitching these low-benefit plans around the country. They cover minimal requirements such as preventive services, but often little more. Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital

Federal officials say this type of plan, in concept, would appear to qualify as acceptable minimum coverage under the law, and let most employers avoid an across-the-workforce $2,000-per-worker penalty for firms that offer nothing. Employers could still face other penalties they anticipate would be far less costly.

But the story goes on to say that the plans may not actually be in full compliance with the new coverage laws:

The idea that such plans would be allowable under the law has emerged only recently. Some benefits advisers still feel they could face regulatory uncertainty. The law requires employers with 50 or more workers to offer coverage to their workers or pay a penalty. Many employers and benefits experts have understood the rules to require robust insurance, covering a list of “essential” benefits such as mental-health services and a high percentage of workers’ overall costs. Many employers, particularly in low-wage industries, worry about whether they—or their workers—can afford it.

But a close reading of the rules makes it clear that those mandates affect only plans sponsored by insurers that are sold to small businesses and individuals, federal officials confirm. That affects only about 30 million of the more than 160 million people with private insurance, including 19 million people covered by employers, according to a Citigroup Inc. report. Larger employers, generally with more than 50 workers, need cover only preventive services, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.

These types of plans are just one strategy companies are looking to in order to avoid penalties associated with the new laws and to save costs:

The low-benefit plans are just one strategy companies are exploring. Major insurers, including UnitedHealth Group Inc., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc., are offering small companies a chance to renew yearlong contracts toward the end of 2013. Early renewals of plans, particularly for small employers with healthy workforces, could yield significant savings because plans typically don’t need to comply with some health law provisions that could raise costs until their first renewal after Jan. 1, 2014.

Insurers and health-benefits administrators are also offering small companies a chance to switch to self-insurance, a form of coverage traditionally used by bigger employers that will face fewer changes under the law. Employers are also considering limiting workers’ hours to avoid the coverage requirements that apply only to full-time employees.

The Washington Post also had a story Monday about how individuals might be able to reduce their out-of-pocket costs when covered by high-deductible health plans:

There is no free lunch. As more people buy high-deductible health plans, they’re discovering that while premiums for such plans are more affordable, the trade-off can be high out-of-pocket costs before coverage kicks in.

However, some plans sold on the individual market offer a way for healthy people to shrink their deductibles. Under so-called deductible-credit plans, the deductible diminishes year by year for policyholders who don’t spend a lot on health care.

Supporters say these programs reward good health by helping customers reduce their costs. But consumer advocates say the programs may discriminate against sick people and run afoul of the Affordable Care Act.

In a plan with a deductible credit, if an enrollee’s health claims don’t exceed the deductible one year, the deductible drops by 20 percent the following year, then by the same amount the following year, until the deductible may eventually be reduced by half, the maximum reduction allowed.

So if someone has a plan with a $5,000 deductible, for example, the deductible could be reduced to $4,000 after the first year. The following year, it could drop another $1,000; after three years, it could be cut to $2,500. If at that point the policyholder had, say, a car accident with claims totaling $10,000, the person would receive credit for the $2,500 reduction and owe less out of pocket. The following year, the deductible would reset to the original $5,000 and the process would start all over again.

It’s obvious that in the search to save money, many people, especially those earning lower salaries are going to have trouble paying for health care. If you have a plan where visiting a hospital isn’t possible, or paying for it out-of-pocket could cost all of your income, then getting the care you need becomes a struggle.

The unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act may end up hurting those who most need it. Continuing to cover what insurance companies will offer and how different companies choose to comply with the law will be a big story. Let’s just hope that the business press remains vigilant on the topic, putting out thorough pieces like these.

In the next breaking scandal, the Justice Department seized phone records from nearly 20 reporters at the Associated Press.

Here are some of the details from National Public Radio:

The Associated Press is protesting what it calls a massive and unprecedented intrusion into its gathering of news. The target of that wrath is the U.S. Justice Department, which secretly collected phone records for several AP reporters last year. The AP says it’s caught in the middle of a Justice Department leak investigation.

The scope of the Justice Department subpoenas is what gives David Schultz, a lawyer for AP, pause.

“It was a very large number of records that were obtained, including phone records from Hartford, New York, Washington, from the U.S. House of Representatives and elsewhere where AP has bureaus. It included home and cellphone numbers from a number of AP reporters,” Schulz says.

It’s not clear what the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., is investigating. But the AP thinks it might be related to its story from May 2012 that described the CIA stopping a terrorist plot to plant a bomb on an airplane with a sophisticated new kind of device.

How that story came to be is the subject of a criminal leak investigation. But the AP says the Justice Department might now be flouting the First Amendment to try to build a case.

According to Politico, reporters inside the AP are (rightly so) outraged over the revelation:

Reporters across The Associated Press are outraged over the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of staff phone records — and they say such an intrusion could chill their relationships with confidential sources.

In conversations with POLITICO on Tuesday, several AP staffers in Washington, D.C., described feelings of anger and frustration with the DOJ and with the Obama administration in general.

“People are pretty mad — mad that government has not taken what we do seriously,” one reporter said on Tuesday. “When the news broke yesterday … people were outraged and disgusted. No one was yelling and screaming, but it was like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’”

 “People are ticked,” said another. “Everyone supports the reporters involved.”

The behind-the-scenes anger — and heads-down determination of the AP staff members to keep doing their jobs amid the extraordinary public flap — comes as top executives from the wire service have mounted an aggressive public pushback against DOJ, calling its snooping a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” in a letter fired off to Attorney General Eric Holder. And yet something of a bunkerlike atmosphere has taken hold at the AP in Washington with no bureau-wide meetings or announcements about the DOJ’s action, AP sources told POLITICO.

The AP employees interviewed by POLITICO did not want to be identified because, according to several sources, at least some journalists have been asked not to speak to the news media.

The Daily News points out that information about why the AP records were monitored is still scant and not forth coming, even from Attorney General Eric Holder:

Holder was pressed repeatedly about the secret and extensive seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors. He underscored that he had recused himself from the investigation early on for various reasons and left subsequent key decisions to top aides, whose actions he backed.

The wire service has protested a “serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news” after disclosure that the government obtained phone records for more than 20 lines.

The reason for the seizure remains somewhat unclear. One suspicion is that it involved an ongoing investigation into leaks of information regarding the CIA’s breaking up a terrorist plot based in Yemen to blow up an airliner.

On May 7, 2012, the AP broke the story of the plot that was uncovered by the CIA. That followed its agreement to hold on to the information for several days at the behest of the White House.

Holder did not confirm or deny that the subpoenas for records followed that specific story. But he said, “This was a very serious leak. A very, very serious leak.”

“I have been a prosecutor since 1976,” he said, “and this is within the top two or three most serious leaks I have seen. It put the American people at risk. That is not hyperbole. Trying to determine who was responsible required very aggressive action.”

David Carr points out that snooping goes both ways in his latest New York Times column:

Word on Monday that the Justice Department had obtained the records of more than 20 phone lines at The Associated Press sent the Fourth Estate into a frenzy. Big Government, Big Data, Big Brother, all the golems of an increasing surveillance-driven age were invoked.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruitt, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, wrote in a letter of protest to Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general.

Given that the government has brought six cases against people suspected of leaking classified information, under an administration that has set a record for the use of the Espionage Act, the Associated Press story adds to a growing atmosphere in which working reporters always need to worry that someone is looking over their shoulder while they type. As Scott Shane wrote in The New York Times in 2012, the investigative aggression creates “a distinct chill over press coverage of national security issues as agencies decline routine interview requests and refuse to provide background briefings.”

In the instance of The Associated Press, its leaders, who were notified of the investigation last Friday, worried that the information obtained would “provide a road map to A.P.’s newsgathering operations and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations.”

All journalists should be worried.

While many in the business news world have been chasing the story of Bloomberg reporters using functions to track subscribers, there’s another scandal looming that could have a broader impact for the nation. The Internal Revenue Service is now being investigated for actions it may have taken against conservative causes.

Here are some of the details from the Wall Street Journal:

The Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to “make America a better place to live,” according to new details of a government probe.

The investigation also revealed that a high-ranking IRS official knew as early as mid-2011 that conservative groups were being inappropriately targeted—nearly a year before then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman told a congressional committee the agency wasn’t targeting conservative groups.

The new disclosures are likely to inflame a widening controversy over IRS handling of dozens of applications by tea-party, patriot and other conservative groups for tax-exempt status.

The details emerged from disclosures to congressional investigators by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. The findings, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, don’t make clear who came up with the idea to give extra scrutiny to the conservative groups.

The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax exempt status. John McKinnon reports on the News Hub.

The inspector general’s office has been conducting an audit of the IRS’s handling of the applications process and is expected to release a report this week. The audit follows complaints last year by numerous tea-party and other conservative groups that they had been singled out and subjected to excessive and inappropriate questioning. Many groups say they were asked for lists of their donors and other sensitive information.

The Washington Post wrote in a blog post Monday that the problems at the IRS could turn into major issues for Democrats as more details about the targeting emerge:

What became clear in the first 72 hours of the story was that this (a) wasn’t an isolated, dumb incident by some random field office, (b) was something high-level officials were aware of, and (c) was going to be in the news cycle for quite some time.

The problem for Democrats is that the IRS’s targeting of conservatives plays directly into a long-held belief by many Republicans (and even some independents) that official government arms are being used to carry out political agendas.

According to ABC News, the scandal is reaching even farther than previously thought:

THE PLOT THICKENS: ABC News has obtained a draft of a soon-to-be-released investigative reporting showing that the Internal Revenue Service began targeting conservative groups as far back as 2010 and that senior IRS officials in Washington have known about it for almost two years. Last week, we learned that the IRS was targeting groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, but it goes beyond that, ABC’s JONATHAN KARL reports. The draft report, conducted by the IRS’s internal watchdog, says the agency was tracking groups who’s goals included, quote “limiting government” and “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” and that, “criticize how the country is being run.” Friday, the White House says it had it no idea the IRS was targeting Tea Party-allied groups. WATCH Karl’s “Good Morning America” report: http://abcn.ws/19igrJV

The timeline in the New York Times offers details about which types of organizations are being targeted:

The I.R.S. has been under pressure from Democrats and campaign finance watchdogs for some time to crack down on abuse of the 501(c)4 tax exemption, which is supposed to go to organizations primarily promoting “social welfare” but which is routinely granted to overt political advocacy groups with little or no social welfare work.

The New York Times obtained a 12-page timeline from the inspector general’s audit on Sunday. It suggests that the effort to single out Tea Party groups goes back to March 2010 when a special Determinations Unit in the Cincinnati office of the I.R.S. began searching tax-exemption applications that focused on groups on one side of the political spectrum, rather than broadly on political groups without a social-welfare mission.

The unit searched for groups using the names “Tea Party,” “Patriots” or “9/12 Project,” a movement begun by Glenn Beck. The unit was also looking for “applications involving political sounding names” like “We the People” or “Take Back the Country,” according to the document. That time frame brought the “Be On the Lookout” list back to the Tea Party movement’s early months, well before the movement helped fuel a historic Republican landslide in 2010.

On June 29, 2011, the document states, Ms. Lerner was briefed. By then the search appeared even more refined to conservative groups. Beyond “Tea Party,” “Patriots” and “9/12 Project,” the Cincinnati team was looking at issues of government spending, debt and taxes; educational efforts to “make America a better place to live”; and statements in the case file that “criticize how the country is being run.”

Ms. Lerner said Friday that the terms “Tea Party” and “Patriots” were used as a “shortcut” by the unit, not as a tool to single out any one political outlook. But the timeline suggests that the search went well beyond a few keywords. Over 100 applications had been identified by that briefing, using criteria with distinctly conservative undertones.

While this might seem like a political story, there are some business implications as well. As Congress begins to debate the overhaul of the tax code, including what corporations will pay, making sure that organizations are properly classified and monitored will be important. And given the relaxed rules corporations have for donating to political causes, this will likely be an important issue for their giving programs as well. Any time government entity that deals with money takes a reputational hit, we should all pay attention.