Banco Popular de Puerto Rico

We always knew the benefits industry could be brutal at times (any of you who have made major benefits changes at your companies know what I’m talking about), and The Hartford’s Tom Westman has taken his survival skills and put them to use on television.

The streets are talking: There’s a new consultant in town (kind of). Six months after announcing their intent to merge, global consulting giants Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt have completed the union, my friends down the hall at EBA reported this morning.

A lot of working Americans are channeling the Stones these days, telling The Conference Board that they can’t get no satisfaction. According to the org’s latest survey, 55% of Americans – across all incomes and age brackets – are unsatisfied with their jobs.

For two lovely years, Jane White, the founder and president of Retirement Solutions LLC, wrote an insightful and incisive column for EBN. I enjoyed and admired her passion for the “other” top tier benefit, which — even with a full-blaze retirement crisis before our eyes — still doesn’t get the first-string play that health care receives.

It's been great writing to you this year in a venue that (I hope) has helped you shake off some of the tension and seriousness that can weigh down the matters we follow in this industry.

With retirement savings accounts taking as much as a 50% hit due to the financial market collapse and ensuing recession, everyone is looking for a way to recoup those losses.

Looks like Congress is trying to make Santa’s “nice” list. The Senate, in particular, was quite busy over the weekend, not only clearing one of the last procedural hurdles in the way of a final vote on health care reform legislation, but also voting 88-10 on Saturday to extend the COBRA subsidy originally implemented in the stimulus package earlier this year.

Panicking about the impact of health care reform legislation? Chances are, your benefit consulting firm has already developed a proprietary tool for this very occasion.

With compromise in the air on Capitol Hill during the holiday season, the stage is set for health care reform legislation passing the House and Senate before boardrooms across Corporate America wrestle with any unintended consequences.

I admit, I’m just not going to read the more than 2,000 pages that are the House and Senate health care reform bills. Maybe it’s the environmentalist in me, or maybe it’s the knowledge that much of what I read would make me mad.