Healthcare

Retirement plan participants who don’t own a long-term care insurance policy and instead choose to self-insure for any LTCI needs in the future run the risk of seeing their life savings decimated by major medical expenses, cautions Jonas Roeser, senior vice president of marketing and operations for LTC Financial Partners LLC.

When Covance's five-year-old mentoring program was digitized, there was understandably some resistance from the HR staff.

In February, the Health and Human Services Department issued proposed regulations addressing the impact of health care reform on student health insurance coverage. The proposed regulations classify student health insurance coverage as a type of "individual health insurance coverage."

Many of us remember when employers provided an opt-out credit to employees who did not enroll in their medical coverage. Over time, as health care costs continued to rise, the opt-out credit was the first to go in most organizations. Then some employers, in an effort to control costs, began to replace the opt-out credit with a spousal surcharge. But is the opt-out credit poised for a return?

There is a dramatic difference in how employers tackle health cost trends. Some are doing "everything possible to control costs and improve workers' health, while others have not been willing or able to do it as aggressively," Helen Darling, president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health told attendees at the Health Benefits 9-1-1: Heightened Urgency to Control Cost and Improve Health conference.

A sluggish economy hasn't slowed the nation's health care consumerism movement, according to a recent analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

You may remember the two extremes depicted in the 2008 presidential election regarding health care. We heard health care proclaimed as an inalienable "right" of sorts. Politicians would ask their constituents polarizing questions like, "Is health care a right for all Americans?" or, "Is it a privilege to which only the wealthy minority are entitled?," as if these two extremes were the only positions that a health care stakeholder (consumer, provider or carrier) might have on such a complex topic.

Looking for a way to promote his latest venture, a website where consumers can select an agent at the same time they buy their policy online, Alan Katz decided to start his own blog both as a hobby and in hopes that linking to it would increase the search engine optimization of the insurance website.

For this year's Preparing for Open Enrollment series, EBN asked you, our readers, to give us your advice for improving this perennial event. Here is the first of three articles featuring your responses, which deals with enrollment communications.

You've likely seen magazine ads, radio commercials and TV promoting miracle treatments for hair loss. Unfortunately, that is what's needed for those treatments to work - a miracle.