Tristan Lejeune

Employment attorney Jonathan Segal told attendees at yesterday’s SHRM legislative event that benefits pros need to show employees their softer, more human side. “Don’t treat employees as plaintiffs waiting to happen,” he said.

Express Scripts, however, says the decline was offset by an 18.4% rise in spending on specialty medications. The aggregate trend for 2012 was a bump of 2.7%, similar to that of 2011.

Life Technologies, a California-based medical research and life sciences company with more than 10,000 employees, shifted its workforce to a CDHP in 2010. Benefits leader Carole Mendoza says the education and communication effort for the change ran the gamut from bathroom newsletters (the old “porcelain press”) to blogs, webinars and social networks.

Technical education is lagging behind the rapid speed of technological growth, says Frederick Brookhouse, business and education partnership manager with Snap-on, and the problems start well before secondary schools.

According to most experts, the number is small and keeps getting smaller. We speak, of course, of the number of companies with 50 or more employees that will drop employer-sponsored insurance in 2014 - opting to send employees to state-run insurance exchanges and pay per-employee fines levied by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. After a McKinsey & Company study in 2011 famously concluded that 30% of employers would "pay" rather than "play," survey after survey has revealed that fewer than 5% of employers plan to eliminate employee health benefits. Even the Government Accountability Office, which originally reported as much as 20% of employers would drop coverage, now has backed off that estimate to around 2%.

Transitions Optical survey reveals only 16% of employees say they receive education from their employer about eye health.

Women and younger workers are particularly likely to favor customizable voluntary benefits, according to a TNS Omnibus survey.

Lifestyle laws in 29 states may hamper employer efforts to maintain a strict smoke-free workplace.

LIMRA reports that 47% of employers with 2-99 employees offer benefits, the lowest level in 20 years.

Disability insurance experts with Guardian Life Insurance Company have developed an index for measuring and predicting the success of companies’ absence management programs in conjunction with their short-term and long-term disability programs.

Employee engagement has risen in the past year, according to Temkin Group research, and those companies with highly engaged employees are reaping personnel and profit rewards.

Only 6% of those surveyed by Aon Hewitt plan to exit employer-sponsored health care entirely, but around 28% are eyeing the next three to five years for a move to a private health care exchange.

MetLife polled hundreds of human resource and benefits professionals about legal services in a voluntary package, and the top reason given among those who make the offering is improving employee satisfaction (69%).

“Over the past few years it’s [been] closing the plan, freezing the plan -- now, we’re actually seeing them trying to shed the liability,” Fidelity’s Laurie E. Vance said in Washington.

Even companies who have no interest in getting involved with a public health care exchange for active employees might help steer their pre-65 retirees toward the marketplace, experts with Fidelity Investments said Thursday.

Those between the ages of 40 and 50 were the most likely (25%) to say they were “not confident” or “completely doubtful” in their ability to retire and maintain their current lifestyle.

In a Midwest Business Group on Health webinar, representatives from three private health insurance exchanges offered insight into what employers, employees and the overall market can gain from the emerging model.

A new study indicates there could be treatment differences when a patient is seen in person versus an e-visit. While follow-up rates were comparable, physicians in e-visits did order different care.

Panel discussion addresses gaps in technical skills and education, and why employers need to take more responsibility for workforce training.

A group of panelists met last week at the Aspen Institute in Washington to discuss the skilled labor shortage, or indeed, if there even is one.