Healthcare

When President Barack Obama criticized Mitt Romney by name this week for embracing a controversial Republican budget proposal, he worded his attack carefully and with bite.

Good news for worksite marketing prospects: Nearly 20% of Americans who shop for life insurance do so through their workplace — and 75% of those shoppers went on to buy life insurance, according to a recent LIMRA survey. However, the survey also reveals several missed opportunities for producers.

Insurers wondering how to engage the Millennial Generation may have to fine-tune their marketing efforts or find more innovative products to pitch. According to market researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, as a result of the Great Recession, a younger cohort of this group has emerged with very different values, desires and lifestyles.

Cost increases for health care are perhaps finally slowing down, with employer health benefit expenditures not expected to increase in 2012 at the same explosive growth in recent years. Costs for all types of medical plans are expected to increase by 9.9% for 2012, according to a survey by Buck Consultants, the first time since 2001 that Buck's survey has projected cost increases less than 10% for any type of plan. The firm has been conducting its survey since 1999.

Americans may be overly optimistic when it comes to thinking they won't ever be diagnosed with a serious illness or experience an accident, according to a recent survey.

Most American investors mistakenly believe that target-date funds provide guaranteed income in retirement, among other misconceptions of how the instruments work, the SEC found in a recent investor survey.

The White House was forced on the defensive on Wednesday as it sought to explain controversial remarks President Barack Obama made earlier in the week about the Supreme Court's review of his signature health care reform law.

There has been a lot of information in the news about health care reform and how it affects small businesses. Yet, I still find many business owners scratching their heads trying to understand what it all means for their businesses. To simplify matters, here are five things small employers must know about employee health benefits—especially in a post-health care reform environment:

Small businesses aren’t known for offering rich retirement plans; workers in firms with fewer than 100 employees are much less likely to have a retirement plan available to them than workers in large firms, according to the Small Business Administration. The financial services industry is making inroads to service small business retirement needs, however, most recently with the Merrill Edge Small Business 401(k) through Bank of America. This retirement solution offers small business owners, who generally have 401(k) plan assets under $250,000, a simplified, easy-to-manage retirement plan with lower costs than many traditional 401(k) plans, enabling small businesses to provide an important benefit to their employees.

Life insurers may want to take a closer look at their annuity offerings. The 2008 financial crisis has changed a lot of financial advisers’ minds about insured retirement solutions, namely variable annuities, according to a new survey by AllianceBernstein L.P. and the Insured Retirement Institute.