Employer Strategies

A corporate health care exchange run by Aon Hewitt is “open and ready for business,” according to Ken Sperling, global health & benefits practice leader for the human resource consulting firm. Aon Hewitt Announced last week that it is launching the exchange for employer groups of 1,000 or more full-time employees beginning as early as January 2012. While the infrastructure — based on Aon Hewitt’s existing retiree benefit exchange model with 2.4 million participants — is built, the timing depends on securing a viable number of both employer and insurance company participants.

The vast majority of U.S. benefits managers reported that their organizations do not do enough to help employees make critical decisions at the point of retirement, according to new survey commissioned by Transamerica Retirement Management.

Some aspects of the health care reform law, including the wellness and prevention provisions, have gained traction and will continue as scheduled in part because employers are taking up the cause by recognizing the importance of implementing prevention and wellness programs to enhance the health of their employees as well as the bottom line.

Retirement plan participants who don’t own a long-term care insurance policy and instead choose to self-insure for any LTCI needs in the future run the risk of seeing their life savings decimated by major medical expenses, cautions Jonas Roeser, senior vice president of marketing and operations for LTC Financial Partners LLC.

Simplicity should be a key goal in plan design, plan objectives and participant communications. Regulations make this challenging, but the benefits of simplicity are many.

When Covance's five-year-old mentoring program was digitized, there was understandably some resistance from the HR staff.

Many of us remember when employers provided an opt-out credit to employees who did not enroll in their medical coverage. Over time, as health care costs continued to rise, the opt-out credit was the first to go in most organizations. Then some employers, in an effort to control costs, began to replace the opt-out credit with a spousal surcharge. But is the opt-out credit poised for a return?

There is a dramatic difference in how employers tackle health cost trends. Some are doing "everything possible to control costs and improve workers' health, while others have not been willing or able to do it as aggressively," Helen Darling, president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health told attendees at the Health Benefits 9-1-1: Heightened Urgency to Control Cost and Improve Health conference.

A sluggish economy hasn't slowed the nation's health care consumerism movement, according to a recent analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

You may remember the two extremes depicted in the 2008 presidential election regarding health care. We heard health care proclaimed as an inalienable "right" of sorts. Politicians would ask their constituents polarizing questions like, "Is health care a right for all Americans?" or, "Is it a privilege to which only the wealthy minority are entitled?," as if these two extremes were the only positions that a health care stakeholder (consumer, provider or carrier) might have on such a complex topic.