One of the "loopholes" available to employers in complying with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the grandfather clause.

If your employee health plan is currently a grandfathered plan, you may want to consider relinquishing that status. Or, if you are among those employers that, for a specific reason, wants to maintain grandfather status, then you need to pay close attention to the rules permitting a plan to be grandfathered in.

Plans can retain grandfathered status if they change plan funding from self-insured to fully insured, or change insurance companies as long as they offer the same coverage. There's no cutoff date for grandfathered plans. They can remain in place as long as the meet the above criteria.