Employee benefits

The annual MetLife Study of Employee Benefits Trends, which tracks major trends and attitudes on the subject of employee benefits, was recently released and it has a good news/bad news message for employers. EBA contributor Ron Leopold shares five ways progressive employers stand out in the benefits arena.

A 65-year-old couple retiring in 2012 is estimated to need $240,000 to cover medical expenses throughout retirement, according to the latest retiree health care costs estimate calculated by Fidelity Investments. This represents a 4% increase from last year, when the estimate was $230,000.

A recent survey by TD Ameritrade uncovers how much financial trouble a fiancé will tolerate before calling off the wedding.

Nearly half of soon-to-be-retired, high-net-worth Americans say they are terrified of what health care costs may do to their retirement plans, according to a new survey.

A majority of employees (90%) recognize the importance of group disability insurance and believe their employer should offer it, according to a recent Unum survey — but most (52%) do not understand this coverage. Not only does this present an opportunity for brokers to build their trusted adviser status with employers, it also has great potential to lead to more sales of the product. Because, despite their lack of knowledge about employer-provided disability insurance, 88% of employees surveyed think is it is personally important to be covered.

Investment products are "overly complex," and investors are feeling "overwhelmed" by the slew investment choices available to them, according to the MFS Investing Sentiment Survey.

In a presidential election cycle where job creation is a key issue, 15% of National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors members surveyed recently say President Barack Obama’s health care reform law’s medical loss ratio provision has decreased their commissions enough to cause them to need to lay-off or reduce the hours of support staff in their offices — affecting an average of two employees per agency.

An effective dialysis management program optimizes the way kidney dialysis is paid for and how treatment is provided. Read as Sam Fleet explains in today's BeAdvised how insurance brokers can help companies capture these savings by bringing them together with innovative benefit managers.

Financial advisers sometimes puzzle over how to effectively reach and serve black and Hispanic clients. A Vanguard study released recently suggests they can start by drilling home a simple message: emergency savings accounts are a must.

U.S. hospitals are ripping out wall-mounted toilets and replacing them with floor models to better support obese patients. The Federal Transit Administration wants buses to be tested for the impact of heavier riders on steering and braking. Cars are burning nearly a billion gallons of gasoline more a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.

In kasina’s yet-to-be released 2nd annual study, findings indicate that about 87% of asset managers and insurers use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but very few are experiencing increased sales.

CVS Caremark Corp raised its full-year forecast on Wednesday after reporting a sharp rise in first-quarter sales as the drugstore operator and pharmacy benefits manager continued to win over former patrons of Walgreen stores.

Health insurers are on the hook for an estimated $1.3 billion in rebates by August of this year, if they were not in compliance with the Medical Loss Ratio provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for 2011, according to analysis by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Employers are giving employees more flexibility to work from home and work various hours as long as employees get work done, but they’re not willing to pay more for various work-life benefits. This is according to a new study released Monday from the Society for Human Resource Management and the Families and Work Institute.

With age comes wisdom supposedly, but even as more Americans are living longer they are not financially prepared for their retirement years and also lack life insurance.

Despite employees’ lack of knowledge about employer-provided disability insurance, almost all respondents recognize the importance of this insurance and desire its coverage, according to a survey released Monday.

In December, I blogged about how voluntary benefits can help employers increase employees’ comfort level with CDHPs. For example, studies have shown that employees are generally uneasy about high out-of-pocket medical cost exposure. They appreciate having voluntary programs such as accident, cancer or critical illness Insurance to help supplement their CDHP coverage in the event of high dollar, unexpected claims. …

There are questions about the future of the group long-term care market, as two insurers have stopped offering the product in the past 17 months.

There were 48.4 million Hispanic people in the U.S. as of 2009, making it the largest ethnicity in the nation. On top of it, Hispanics make up 14.8% of the civilian labor force. Projections suggest that "language minority students" (those who speak a language other than English at home and who have varying levels of proficiency in English) will comprise over 40% of elementary and secondary students by 2030.

Cathy Meyers had already fought cancer twice, once in 1992, again in 2003, before she was diagnosed for a third time with neuroendocrine cancer in the pancreas in 2009. She thought her time was up. How could fate hand someone a proverbial death sentence three times in a row, with the third being the same cancer that sent Steve Jobs to his deathbed?