Healthcare

In recent years, a number of states have begun toying with the idea of creating their own retirement systems to help smaller employers provide workers rudimentary retirement savings opportunities.

Commentary: Critical considerations that make a stop-loss plan successful for clients of all sizes, according to Sun Life’s Brad Nieland.

The still-under-development federal fiduciary standard for retirement advisers has many in the industry genuinely concerned about their ability to continue to serve both employers and individual American savers.

A fiduciary’s decisions around the investment plan menus should be less about what other plans offer, and more about what is in plan participants’ best interests.

Fewer than one in five American workers are contributing to traditional individual retirement accounts, with many pointing to a lack in financial confidence to afford such contributions as one of the biggest reasons for not investing.

The fight over the Affordable Care Act in Washington is as fierce as ever, with a Republican budget plan that would repeal the health care law Democrats passed five years ago. In the rest of the country, opposition to the law appears to be easing.

An Affordable Care Act-fueled surge in self-insurance for medical benefits among smaller employers appears to have leveled off somewhat, but not due to any disenchantment with the cost-management strategy.

A lack of understanding about the benefits of having both an individual retirement account and a 401(k) or 403(b) may help explain why some Americans are not contributing or considering an IRA as part of their retirement strategy.

Commentary: Employers who start revising their FMLA policies to address this change should also use it as an opportunity to review their benefit plan language to make sure it accurately reflects the updated definition.

Recent guidance from the National Labor Relations Board includes details about the types of employer policies and rules likely to be considered to unlawfully interfere with employees’ rights.