News Feed

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.

Two Republican congressional leaders have written to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman demanding information on how the IRS is spending $1 billion in funds the agency received under the health care reform law.

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.

This article is the third in EBN's year-long BeneFIT Success series, which chronicles employers and employees in their individual and organizational wellness triumphs. The first installment, "Uphill battle, downhill momentum," was featured in the March EBN and the second, "Popular wellness program proving to be common link for diverse employee population," appeared in EBN April 15. Both articles are available at ebn.benefitnews.com, keywords "benefit success series." Learn more about how to submit your company as a candidate for the series at the end of this article.

Our clients often ask us to define who in their organizations are fiduciaries to their retirement plans and exactly what it means to be a fiduciary. Many times, our clients are surprised by the answers that they get. You may be as well.

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.

In February, the Health and Human Services Department issued proposed regulations addressing the impact of health care reform on student health insurance coverage. The proposed regulations classify student health insurance coverage as a type of "individual health insurance coverage."

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?

Have you ever wondered, "Can we really measure the improvement in health that comes from wellness programs?" Most companies are using biometric screenings as their key tool for measuring health, on the assumption that it accurately measures the kind of health that matters most. Think again.