A Cincinnati restaurant's health plan covers salaried managers but excludes hourly servers, even though both groups meet the plan's hours-worked requirement. Under Ohio's small-employer rules, eligibility conditions must be:

Why A is correct

ORC 3924.01 lets an employer set eligibility conditions, but those conditions must rest on employment-related factors — such as hours worked or job classification — and must be applied consistently to employees in the same situation. Using eligibility rules as a device to exclude particular people, or to smuggle in health or claims considerations, defeats the uniform-application principle behind the small-employer framework.

Why the other options are wrong

• B) The conditions are the employer's employment-based conditions under ORC 3924.01, not whatever the insurer prefers account by account.
• C) ORC 3924.01 does not impose one identical eligibility design on every employer; it requires employment-based, consistently applied conditions.
• D) Employee-by-employee approval is not part of the eligibility mechanism in ORC 3924.01.

Memory hook

Same class, same rules — eligibility by the job, never by the person.