Employer Strategies

Liberty Mutual Insurance’s Group Benefits operation became the first to introduce a mobile application that makes it easier for employees and clients to manage their benefits.

American Airlines kicked off a week-long court hearing on its bid to abandon union contracts, telling a judge on Monday that its bankrupt parent, AMR Corp, cannot survive without major concessions from its labor force.

Employers continue to move from traditional defined benefit pension plans providing monthly payments to 401(k) plans and other defined contribution plans providing lump-sum cash distributions. As a result, increasing numbers of retirees, now including baby boomers leaving the workplace, are faced with managing a cash distribution for 20 or 30 years and possibly running out of funds. Uncertain markets have made plan participants wary of their ability to maintain their nest eggs. …

Currently, 59% of major employers have a consumer-driven health plan option in place, up from 53% a year ago, according to a survey by Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health. The groups queried companies with 1,000 or more employees across a range of industries.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued a proposed rule addressing the fees imposed by the Affordable Care Act on issuers of certain health insurance policies and plan sponsors of certain self-insured health plans to fund comparative effectiveness research. These fees are designed to support the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund. The Affordable Care Act includes provisions establishing the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a private, nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to “assist, through research, patients, clinicians,…

Although the focus of discussion among health plan thought leaders who convened in Florida last month at The Managed Care Executive Group ran the gamut from care management to meaningful use, to medical informatics, payment reforms, HSAs and more, technology’s role in the industry’s success was evident.

A new study comparing utilization rates of patients filling 90-day prescription medications using community and mail order pharmacies found that when copays are similar, patients preferred the community pharmacy channel by a ratio of four to one.

Can a board member of a tax-exempt nonprofit also be a salaried officer of the organization?

Annabel Adams has seen a lot in her life: 9/11, the dot-com bust, the housing collapse, the financial crisis, the Great Recession.

Forty-two percent of respondents have used social media to access consumer reviews of treatments or physicians, 30% have supported a health cause, 25% have posted content about their own health experiences and 20% have joined a health forum or community, according to the Health Research Institute of PricewaterhouseCoopers.