With the Affordable Care Act’s employer shared responsibility reporting requirements for 2015 quickly approaching, benefit advisers should already be working with employer clients to implement benefit administration systems to ensure compliance with the law, industry experts say.

More than two dozen industry experts to share where employee benefit advising is heading and how to succeed during this time of change at EBA's Workplace Benefits Summit.

Hallmark’s director of wellness engagement shares her company’s success tactics and provides tips on how advisers can help their clients to start a program and make it successful.

A new self-service tool for employers and brokers aims to make the RFP process for pharmacy benefit plans a little easier.

Commentary: There is one big problem with health insurance that continues to get bigger: health care deductibles continue to rise. This poses challenges for both employers who provide benefits and employees as well.

Commentary: The best of the emerging broker decision-support tools will inspire a more customized set of benefits options for workers, and a growth in voluntary benefits participation. Those brokers who seize this opportunity will become indispensable to the coming transformation of the group benefits space.

Many of your employer clients will soon face hefty penalties under the ACA for failing to make an offer of health care coverage. Legal experts clarify what that offer of coverage must be.

In an era when health care consumerism is being touted as a game-changer for employer-sponsored benefits, offering employees a variety of choices when it comes to how and where they fill their drug prescriptions is an important satisfaction driver.

Commentary: Tracking of employee hours must begin in January 2015 in order to comply with ACA and IRS mandates, so make sure your clients know the pros and cons of available measuring methods now.

Commentary: Promote the need for life insurance coverage before enrollment season, says The Standard’s John West, who provides several talking points advisers can address with clients.

Those who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s state and federal exchanges will have more choices for coverage beginning in 2015, according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released Tuesday.

Commentary: High-limit personal umbrella coverage can be a door-opener for brokers and consultants, says Sam Fleet, president of AmWINS Group Benefits.

Patients with a consumer-driven health plan receive fewer preventive services than patients in traditional health plans, a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found. The results give advisers an opportunity to work with clients to proactively address any differences in quality between CDHPs and traditional plans.

Premiums for health plans purchased on the Affordable Care Act’s Small Business Health Options Program exchanges were slightly cheaper than plans only offered elsewhere, a recent study found, but advisers say the study misses the big picture.

Commentary: Despite perceived cost savings, most narrow networks have actually missed the opportunity to improve value — and their lack of transparency threatens to unleash a ferocious consumer backlash, says Dartmouth's Scott Wallace.

Many employers are "taking necessary steps to rein in costs," the National Business Group on Health says, but a new Mercer survey shows plenty remain on auto-pilot.

Employers are making changes to reshape their health benefit plans between now and 2017 in order to reduce costs, according to Towers Watson’s 2014 Health Care Changes Ahead Survey. In particular, employers pointed to three specific factors that will help frame employer-sponsored benefits.

  Walgreen Co.’s director of health, benefits and wellbeing knew his company, like most in the U.S., was on an unsustainable path of increasing health care costs combined with employees who didn’t focus on their wellbeing. But when the company’s senior directors started thinking about moving employee health care offerings to a private exchange, he was adamantly against it. …

New plan designs mean "real opportunity" for sales to a key demographic in the long-term care market.

Employers who moved to Aon Hewitt’s multi-carrier fully-insured private health care exchange experienced overall health care cost savings for the 2014 plan year — providing some of the first data on the impact of post-Affordable Care Act private exchanges.