Bruce Shutan

Are cost-containment strategies and employee satisfaction mutually exclusive when it comes to retention?

Getting employees to support health savings accounts depends on the way they’re communicated alongside the concept of a high-deductible health plan, which can be a tricky proposition. But there are solutions at hand.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) poses both a moral and business dilemma for worksite wellness programs, but a leading authority suggests that it can be overcome with careful thought and the right strategy in place.

Private enterprise is limbering up for the 2012 EBN-EBA Financial Fitness Challenge, an online financial-education program sponsored by Employee Benefit News and Employee Benefit Adviser in partnership with Educated Investor, a provider of financial education products. Organizations of all types and sizes, from Walmart to Woodchuck Hard Cider, are taking part in the Challenge, which began last month.

Private enterprise is limbering up for the 2012 EBN-EBA Financial Fitness Challenge, an online financial-education program sponsored by Employee Benefit News and Employee Benefit Adviser in partnership with Educated Investor.

Sedentary office workers, including busy HR practitioners, may want to stand up to absorb some provocative news published in the online medical journal BMJ Open: Most Americans could live two years longer on average if they’d spend less than three hours a day sitting.

A battle is brewing to influence public opinion over the drivers of rising prescription drug benefit costs, cost-containment strategies and the path to meaningful health care reforms.

When employees of Huntington Ingalls Industries subsidiary AMSEC LLC say they’ve lost a ton of weight, they’re not kidding.

As California goes, so goes the nation, according to an old axiom. But will optimism about relief from pending health insurance rate hikes for tens of thousands of small businesses in the Golden State spill into other states or be buoyed by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)?

If the latest jobs data could sing, the song would be “Summertime Blues.”

An impending showdown in Los Angeles pits Walmart against community activists who decry expansion plans by the world’s largest retailer in the nation’s second-largest city.

As if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act didn’t give employers enough to worry about, a PPACA-related regulatory headache may be taking hold for small firms.

The lines of demarcation between work and life beyond office walls may have largely disappeared in many organizations, but that’s not to say employees are always accessible when they’re out of the office. With summer officially kicking off on Wednesday, there could be mounting anxiety about reaching vacationing coworkers.

There's no denying that target-date funds are easy to understand and wildly popular with 401(k) plan participants, especially among new and inexperienced investors. But their performance has fallen considerably short in a still-fragile economy, as leading fund managers have pursued misguided strategies.

Semantics are supremely important in making or breaking certain lines of insurance.

Semantics are supremely important in making or breaking certain lines of insurance.

Everyday services that help strike a better work-life balance have become an increasingly valuable part of the benefits package - even if employees are the ones who pick up the tab. But what is the best way to deliver this assistance to the workplace to ensure satisfaction and boost program utilization?

There's a lot of strategic talk in Big Sky Country these days about the power of biometric screenings, health care analytics, value-based pharmacy benefit management, captives insurance and state-run health cooperatives under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Keys to dental plan success lie in contracting with right network, increasing provider population, carriers say.

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.