Wellness

With the issuance of the final employer mandate regulations, employers mandate can now make employee coverage decisions and prepare for enforcement beginning as early as Jan. 1, 2015.

This week started out with the much anticipated employer responsibility ruling and first shocked us with the additional employer mandate delay. But there’s much more to the ruling that advisers and plan sponsors need to be aware of in the coming months.

Fewer people are getting their primary health insurance coverage through their employers, according to a Gallup Poll released Wednesday, which also reported the number of uninsured Americans has reached a five-year low.

Welltok Inc., vendor of a Web-based health wellness platform called CafeWell that providers and payers can offer to consumers, is the latest organization to collaborate with IBM Corp. to enhance the health care cognitive computer capabilities of the Watson supercomputer.

The day after Addie Wilson was quoted in a newspaper article complaining about her experience with President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, her mobile phone rang while she was in the bathroom.

Obamacare health plans enrolled 3.3 million people through January, with young adult participants increasing 65% from a month earlier, the U.S. government said.

Wellness can specifically increase job satisfaction among current and prospective employees. However, employers can’t expect these results to occur overnight. While many launch wellness programs, they often fall short of expectations. Perhaps the biggest reason this happens is inadequate communications to employees.

Health insurers told to pay $150 billion in taxes over a decade to help fund Obamacare are now shifting at least part of that cost back to taxpayers.

Some locations of the Planet Fitness health club chain have begun charging some of their members a portion of the indoor tanning services tax mandated by the Affordable Care Act, whether or not they use the tanning services.

President Barack Obama said a delay until 2016 in his health care mandate for mid-sized employers is an adjustment that doesn’t undermine the law.