Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

Walgreen Co. become the latest large employer to make significant changes to its employee health plan when it announced that it will move approximately 160,000 of its employees onto a private health insurance exchange, starting in 2014. The strategy is starting to look like a trend: Over the last several months, IBM, Time Warner, Sears Holdings and Darden Restaurants have all made similar announcements.

For HR professionals, mid-year nondiscrimination testing needs to be at the top of that list. Waiting to test until the completion of the year can have severe negative consequences.

Even if their employees don't use the exchanges, their functioning depends pretty heavily on some critical interactions among exchanges, employers, and their employees.

Employers and HR professionals will have to come to terms with the most common (but hopefully not absolutely systemic) reality for employees: rates will, in some cases, go up. That’s a simple fact of life, and you can blame the ACA all you want, but the truth is that health care rates were likely to inch marginally anyhow.

Reasonable cost, high participation rates and a broad investment fund line-up contribute to the success of a 401(k) plan but other factors are important too.

Wellness — like any major change — cannot solely be a top-down effort, launched with a letter from the president, especially at consensus-driven academic institutions.

There’s no denying major medical insurance is the cornerstone of a good benefits package, so the intense focus on it is understandable, particularly in light of the ACA. But employers may be letting the towering tree of major med completely obscure their view of the broad benefits horizon.

Eighty percent of people think they're better-than-average investors. Here are five reasons why, and three ways employers can help plan participants overcome their investing challenges.

Now that our elected officials in Washington have come to a short-term budget agreement, what can we expect in the markets and economy for the near term? Unfortunately, probably much of the same.

As the dust settles and national monuments reopen and all those furloughed government workers (and cash-starved private sector workers they support and interact with) go back to work today, the danger may be that Broader America may actually focus some attention on what the ACA will actually mean to them. Especially as it was not all magically wiped away in some Tea Party inspired publicity stunt.