Healthcare

As private exchange providers introduce voluntary benefit offerings, how will broker commissions be affected?

Several factors, including the economy and technological advances, are contributing to a slowdown in the health care cost growth rate in the U.S., studies show.

As the gap widens on whether e-cigarettes are part of the solution or still part of the greater problem of employee smoking cessation, their popularity is still on the rise. Experts from the health management group HealthFitness have provided some additional tips for employers taking on the challenge of creating e-cigarette policies in the workplace.

EBN’s annual i-COMM Awards recognize the best in internal communication of benefits, and are awarded in four categories: Best Overall Communications Campaign, Best Print or Online Employee Newsletter, Best Employee Intranet or Portal and Best Use of Social Media. In this four-part series, we highlight this year’s winners, starting with AECOM, i-COMM winner for Best Overall Communications Campaign.

Diana Andersen’s efforts to educate employees made the Affordable Care Act a ‘nonevent’ for Zions Bancorporation. Andersen is EBN’s 2014 Benny Award winner for Benefits Leadership in Health Care.

While online training and development courses may have a bad rap for being mundane, new strides are being taken to create more innovative and engaging programs with a focus on human achievement.

CMS says small employers and their benefit advisers in select states will have early access to the ACA’s Small Business Health Options Program to test-drive the system, but not all are interested.

Some industry sectors are bucking the trend from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans, with more than half of companies in the insurance and utility sectors still offering DB and DC retirement plans to new salaried employees.

MetLife was deemed systemically important by a panel of regulators, a decision that would subject the biggest U.S. life insurer to stricter Federal Reserve oversight.

Ever since final rules under the Affordable Care Act dictated that outcomes-based wellness programs must offer reasonable alternatives to employees unable to achieve the program’s health benchmarks, employers have continued to worry over the effectiveness of their health improvement efforts.