Healthcare

The health care website’s improved performance has both U.S. political parties shifting strategies, with President Barack Obama’s team preparing a January advertising blitz and a wave of celebrity promotions to boost enrollment, allies said.

With the ACA requiring even more communications to employees, many employers might consider shifting to electronic means for all disclosure notices, but there are many rules here and employers and their advisers should be careful.

There is a big difference between price and cost when it comes to disability insurance, writes The Standard's Steve Brady.

Some 45% of workers in the new survey who found retirement income estimates less than “very helpful” say they did not understand the calculations behind the projections or were not confident in their accuracy, according to LIMRA.

More people signed up for Obamacare health plans in the first two days of December than in all of October after the U.S. government rehabilitated its error-prone insurance-exchange website.

The federal agency in charge of exchanges is communicating with brokers about technology improvements, but brokers say they haven’t heard much of anything, yet.

Employers, on the whole, report seeing their health care costs continuing to rise – most suggest that costs will jump 19% between 2013 and 2014 alone.

Employers continue to see a rise in health insurance costs. Annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage reached $16,351 in 2013, up 4% from last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) 2013 Employer Health Benefits Survey. So how can employers work to control these costs? A key success factor in reducing health insurance costs is the leadership’s commitment to this strategy. Can you find top-down leadership commitment to a long-term program…

The 2013 Deloitte Employer Survey finds that many employers see the entire health care system as being expensive and wasteful, and indicate that they don’t believe the ACA will do much to help to change the situation.

The move comes in response to Republican lawmakers’ criticism of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act over the healthcare.gov website troubles and the cancellation notices sent to hundreds of thousands of current policy holders as a result of the law.