Shana Sweeney

All of the benefit summaries, including the new Summary of Benefits and Coverage, do not adequately explain the full effects of balance billing.

With close to 70% of the world's purchasing power outside the U.S., the chances are your company will, at some point, expand into new countries. Depending on your background, you may or may not have had exposure to benefit practices in different regions of the world. Regardless of what country you expand into, there are significant differences in retirement and health care models and delivery between the U.S. and other countries.

Columnist Shana Sweeney outlines some of the latest health and wellness gadgets and websites she saw at the Health 2.0 conference.

Contributing Editor Shana Sweeney profiles five tech startups that can fill gaps in current health and wellness programs.

With trepidation, I slowly opened the envelope from the Department of Labor hoping that it was only a routine communique. My worst fears were realized when, upon reading it, I discovered that our 401(k) plan was being audited. Along with the letter was a three-page list of documents DOL had requested and the date representatives from the agency would be coming onsite. Gulp!

Starting in July, 401(k) plan participants will start receiving quarterly fee disclosures. These rules apply to plan years beginning after October 31, 2011, and require the disclosures to be distributed no later than 60 days after the beginning of the plan year. So for a calendar year plan, fee disclosures need to be distributed no later than August 31, 2012.

Open enrollment is often one of the busiest times of the year for most benefit professionals. After finishing all of the plan updates, budgets and the communication strategy, we have the open enrollment meetings. With any luck, you won't find yourself in a crowded room of people at the height of flu season. For those of you not lucky enough to escape air travel, late nights and multiple meetings, here are some tips for staying healthy during open enrollment time.

Each year, benefits professionals around the country spend months determining the plan of action for the next year's health care. Numbers are crunched. Alternatives are explored. Numbers are crunched again. Finally, all of the information is compiled and presented to the executive team. While we don't think of it as presenting a business case, that is essentially what we do each year - and we can learn a lot from our peers in marketing, product development and finance about building an effective business case.

How well do your employees really understand their health plan? Do you know the readability score of the materials you provide them? How much jargon is included in your summary plan descriptions? How do you educate new grads entering the workforce and individuals working in the U.S. for the first time on the intricacies of health insurance? Is it even an employer's responsibility to improve health literacy?

The flowers are blooming. The mad rush of lost ID cards and questions about new benefits has faded into distant memory. That means that it's time to start planning for next year! Your insurance carriers are calling you to schedule a lengthy meeting to review your annual data from the prior year and attempting sell you additional products and offerings.

Having personally helped employees through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti and now the disaster in Japan, I can see that while workers affected by each of these crises had different needs, eight core benefits needs consistently were raised:

Among the many provisions of health care reform legislation is a mandate to cover all preventive services at 100%. Although this provision does not go into effect for grandfathered plans until 2014, it already is in effect for nongrandfathered plans.

For once, we weren't trying to innovate, iterate or invest in something new. We simply wanted to successfully launch a consumer-driven health plan. We thought it would be easy, since many employers had already delved into these issues before us.