The future of the investment advisory industry depends on reducing the cost of doing business, said Mark Casady, Chairman and CEO of LPL Financial, in the opening keynote at the Money Management Institute’s 2011 annual convention, held last week in Boston.

Ternian Insurance Group has introduced HealthBasic, a limited medical plan for small employers with as few as five lives. The plan features different levels of coverage for different classes of employees: a mid-level plan for owners and two affordable limited medical plans for salaried and hourly employees.

A coalition of 27 health, aging, labor and consumer organizations has released a report, the "Consumer Platform for Health IT," which they call a vision for a patient-centered health care system.

Several group benefits providers, including Sun Life Financial, Aetna, UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, have won plain language awards from the Center for Plain Language.

Almost everyone in Massachusetts has health insurance under a state mandate, but many doctors do not accept the subsidized insurance programs available to low-income residents, a new study shows.

A pension expert panned federal lawmakers’ efforts to increase oversight of state and local governments’ public pension plans.

Large health insurers expect an increase in deals in the industry after last year's U.S. healthcare overhaul made it tougher for smaller companies to compete.

With the equity markets’ recent woes in the past, variable annuity sales perked up in 2010, according to the Insured Retirement Institute in Washington, D.C.

We’ve developed online benefit portals and with only a few keystrokes, a complete file is sent on an electronic data interface (EDI). My simple view is it’s like happy hour for a bunch of computers — one system talks to another, then another, and hopefully they’ll all have cheerful dispositions. When happy hour prices go sour, so do the error messages I receive.

Last week LTC Financial Partners, LLC (LTCFP) announced the formation of a new division called Worksite Academy to help solve a critical problem for employers: maintaining productivity with an aging workforce.

Payroll and benefits outsourcing provider Paychex has acquired online 401(k) administrator ePlan Services.

U.S. hospitals that improve medical care for elderly patients and reduce deadly errors will get millions of dollars under an incentive program launched on Friday that aims to cut overall Medicare costs.

A corporate health care exchange run by Aon Hewitt is “open and ready for business,” according to Ken Sperling, global health & benefits practice leader for the human resource consulting firm. Aon Hewitt Announced last week that it is launching the exchange for employer groups of 1,000 or more full-time employees beginning as early as January 2012. While the infrastructure — based on Aon Hewitt’s existing retiree benefit exchange model with 2.4 million participants — is built, the timing depends on securing a viable number of both employer and insurance company participants.

The vast majority of U.S. benefits managers reported that their organizations do not do enough to help employees make critical decisions at the point of retirement, according to new survey commissioned by Transamerica Retirement Management.

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.

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.

When Covance's five-year-old mentoring program was digitized, there was understandably some resistance from the HR staff.

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?

There is a dramatic difference in how employers tackle health cost trends. Some are doing "everything possible to control costs and improve workers' health, while others have not been willing or able to do it as aggressively," Helen Darling, president and CEO of the National Business Group on Health told attendees at the Health Benefits 9-1-1: Heightened Urgency to Control Cost and Improve Health conference.

A sluggish economy hasn't slowed the nation's health care consumerism movement, according to a recent analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.