Benefits Think

With only six weeks left in the year, now’s generally the time when employees peek at their flexible spending account balances and think, “Uh oh. How do I spend this money so I don’t lose it?” The experts at Save Smart, Spend Healthy offer six tips for you pin up in employees’ cubicles to help them zero out their accounts before the year-end deadline.

You may have celebrated at the news that Mark Haub, a Kansas State University nutrition professor, had lost 27 pounds and lowered his cholesterol levels by eating a 10-week diet of mostly Twinkies and Doritos. But before you go on a Twinkie binge, health and wellness expert Ron Ringlein says to look at Haub’s diet a bit more closely.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Andrew Webber, president and CEO of the National Business Coalition on Health, spoke up on your behalf about employer costs and concerns regarding health care reform.

In response to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform's proposals to reduce the national debt, the president and CEO of the American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries claimed, "recommendations from the draft report … would eliminate tax incentives for retirement savings and negatively impact the ability of working Americans to effectively prepare for retirement.”

After pulling together the efforts of a high-powered team of journalists, benefits experts, videographers and stylists — okay, maybe not the stylists or videographers — Employee Benefit News is happy to announce the launch of BenefitsTV, its new video series that brings you face-to-face with benefits experts and newsmakers as they share their insights on the industry news of the day.

The technology to support these types of telemedicine is advancing speedily along. The speed of physicians and health plans adopting it, however, is a different — and much slower — story. I talked to Eric Demers, senior vice president of health and life sciences at MEDecision, about why telemedicine is so slowly advancing and the role employers can play to push progress along.

Voluntary turnover overall has dropped 21% since 2008 to 7.3%, and voluntary turnover rates among high performers dropped from 5.7% in 2006 to 3.7% in 2009, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the latest in benefits conventional wisdom, news or analysis, I’d like to invite you to send me your bio and a writing sample to be considered for one of EBN’s open Contributing Editor slots.

Soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a "monstrosity," and that he and his newly empowered Republican colleagues would seek to "replace it with commonsense reforms that will bring down the cost of health care in America."

Should Republicans gain a majority in the House and/or the Senate, the long-known opponents to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act could "bar the Department of Health and Human Services from writing the necessary regulations to implement” health care reform, as well as "bar appropriations of the necessary funds," says one health care expert.