News Feed

Advisers looking for innovative ways to help their clients attack health care costs now have a new arrow in their quiver: the nascent field of surgery benefit management. SBM combines the use of medical centers of excellence and medical tourism with data mining, predictive modeling, health coaching and case management.

Employers struggling to stay afloat in the flood of guidance on implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will find themselves looking both forward and backward this year. Their challenge: to gauge how the PPACA rules issued so far are affecting their plans while at the same time anticipating the changes that lie ahead in 2012, 2014, and even 2018.

On Capitol Hill the rubber has met the road on health reform. Last month saw three noteworthy attacks on PPACA. First the House passed the PPACA repeal bill that House Speaker John Boehner had promised. Then came the ruling by a federal district court judge in Florida that the entire law is unconstitutional. This was followed by passage in the Senate of a bill to repeal PPACA's widely disliked 1099 tax reporting burden.

As President Barack Obama's health care reform package worked its way through Congress in 2009 and early 2010, Randy Flem kept a close eye on the proceedings. When Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, Flem knew it was time to dive in. A veteran of the political process, "I had this belief that I could make a difference," says Flem. "So I just moved forward."

It was just last March when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law. Now, one year later, the one thing that seems to be most certain ... is that nothing is certain at all.

Medical benefit sponsors remain caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place: rising costs are hitting the bottom line hard, yet uncertainty over regulatory implementation of federal reform legislation – and the prospect it might be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court – has put long-term strategic decision-making into near limbo. To help, EBN reached out to some of the most influential thought leaders for their best thinking on what employers can and should be doing to cope in the current environment.

I received two survey releases within the last few days: one from ComPsych that outlined employees’ main health priorities for 2011, the other from Unum that revealed what HR pros’ identified as their biggest challenges this year.

Girls who get migraines appear more likely than their peers to gain extra weight during adulthood, scientists say.

U.S. health officials are considering including tests for sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and hepatitis B for the elderly and disabled covered under Medicare.

Only 10% of Americans with $5 million to $25 million in investable assets described themselves as “very wealthy” in a recent survey by Spectrem Group, and 28% considered their wealth “moderate.”