Employer Strategies

Walgreens said last Friday it will increase staffing at its call centers and offer discounts as it tries to hang onto customers once it stops filling prescriptions for Express Scripts Inc. members.

One week after new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the number of children with insurance increased by 1.2 million since President Obama signed the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act in 2009, more than $296 million was awarded to states for ensuring more children have health coverage.

Arranging and financing long-term care is an issue everyone will face yet no one wants to talk about. However, following the Health Department's move to table the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, planning for long-term care is becoming part of the national conversation - and that presents opportunities and challenges for employers.

As employees take on more responsibility for paying for health care, voluntary benefits can provide much-needed additional coverage. EBN spoke to a number of voluntary benefits providers to get their thoughts on the major trends they see coming in 2012. Not surprisingly, all the trends and influences in the HR world at large - health care reform, employer cost-shifting, technology and communications - affect the voluntary benefits industry as well. Here, we provide a summary of key trends, along with charts and data to help employers plan their voluntary benefits strategy going forward.

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

An employer's first experience defending a harassment case can be a harsh introduction to the challenges and biases of the American legal system. Empowered with some basic knowledge about the process, HR/benefits professionals can survive the ordeal and shine in the eyes of senior management.

After months of crunching numbers, your company concludes the only way to control its rising health care costs is to replace its current plan with a high-deductible, consumer-driven health plan. You assume employees are going to hate it, and you're already envisioning the nasty calls you're going to get from irate workers who see an increase in their out-of-pocket expenses. So should you even bother asking employees what they think, since the plan design's already a done deal?

Michael D. Klansek knew something was up with his company when he read Towers Watson statistics earlier this year that showed total health care costs per employee per year are at $11,176. His PEPY costs in 2011? $7,707. And they've been that way since 2006.

"House" - the TV series following a brilliant, but curmudgeonly and troubled doctor - is of course a Hollywood production, but this fiction may be based in fact. At least one-third of all physicians will experience a time during which they have a physical, mental or behavioral condition that impairs their ability to practice medicine safely, according to The Annals of Internal Medicine.

As you consider offering more value-added benefits to your employee population, I encourage you to think about seriously offering long-term care insurance. As many of us are seeing our parents and other family members live well into their 80s and 90s, it's more and more likely that the elderly people in our lives will at some point need long-term care services. It's the rare and fortunate elderly person who continues to live independently in his or her own home without home care services.