Healthcare

In exclusive interviews, Mercer’s Julio Portalatin and the heads of several other top brokerages — Gallagher, Lockton, Higginbotham, Willis and Pacific Resources —speak with EBA about their strategies for sustained development and staying ahead of the competition.

The IRS has issued a notice, regulations and other guidance related to the ACA, including information on getting a hardship exemption from the individual mandate for health insurance coverage.

Commentary: Reference-based pricing is slowly catching on with self-insured companies, says AmWINS Group Benefits’ Sam Fleet.

With mental illness and substance abuse costing employers an estimated $100 billion annually in indirect costs alone, benefit decision-makers are seeing value in promoting employee assistance programs as a means to improve their workforce’s mental well-being.

Towers Watson has spent nearly a billion dollars of its own capital to build out its private exchange offering, OneExchange, through acquisitions. Jim Foreman, Towers Watson’s director of exchange solutions, shares how voluntary continues to grow in a private HIX marketplace and why more and more employers are expressing interest in the offerings.

HHS proposes making some significant changes to the ACA in 2016, including controversial new requirements for brokers and agents that some say put them at an unfair disadvantage.

Commentary: What makes employers slow to adopt a defined contribution strategy? There are many reasons, says bswift’s Brianna Petro.

With its sights set on maintaining lifetime retirement income for the American workforce, a new final rule from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation hopes to limit any obstacles participants face when rolling over their 401(k) money into traditional pension plans.

While 401(k) plans may not be the perfect retirement plan vehicle, they do have a number of important attributes that most probably take for granted.

A randomized controlled trial found that users of the SmartQuit program, created by Seattle-based 2Morrow, Inc., were 2.5 to three times more likely to quit smoking than those who tried to quit on their own. The program will be offered through employers, health plans and states.