Employee benefits

Self-funding used to be exclusively for big companies that had a solid cushion of assets, plenty of cash flow and a large employee population across which to spread risk.

U.S. workers can expect median base salary increases of 2.8% in 2011, compared to 2.4% in 2010, while executives and skilled trades workers can anticipate a 2.7% increase, according to the Salary Budgets Survey by the Hay Group.

Special-interests groups among employees are not only making a comeback in corporate America, but the groups are also receiving significant financial support from employers, finds a new study by Mercer.

The nation’s the largest health care and voluntary benefits software provider recently teamed up with NASCO to burnish a technology investment made by Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans and improve CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield’s billing system efficiency.

Three months after a leading private equity firm sought to acquire all of Pre-Paid Legal Services Inc.’s common stock for $60 per share in cash, another suitor has come calling for the provider of legal services through the worksite and individual markets to more than 1.5 million families across North America.

Although life insurance made modest gains in the third quarter of 2010 when gross written premiums were up 6% from the same period a year earlier, an Aite Group report notes that premiums fell to historic lows in 2009 when the product was considered an unnecessary discretionary purchase.

Two recent reports on disability issues conclude that fewer working Americans filed such claims during the height of the economic downturn and that there’s a serious misunderstanding about disability and the value of income-protection planning.

Days after delivering what he called a “little speech” (also known as the State of the Union address), President Obama vehemently defended the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, rallying the audience of a Families USA conference in Washington, D.C., that “we are moving forward.”

Guardian Life will withdraw its medical insurance product line in all states, and will wind down its existing business over the next two years.

The reverberations from last year’s seismic legislative tilts will be keenly felt by insurers in the coming year. A new report by Boston-based Aite Group finds reaction to health care reform and financial services reform among five trends that will shape each sector respectively.

Of the 568 short-term disability, accident and critical-illness claimants with voluntary policies from Unum responding to an independent customer-satisfaction survey, 90% said they would recommend the carrier to their co-workers.

Dearborn National’s Worksite and Individual Solutions division hopes to reach new heights with Mountain Vista, a new term life plan aimed at working-class Americans with premiums projected to be level for 10, 20 or 30 years.

Helping employees understand the language of finance enables benefit advisers to better meet the needs of clients ...

The value of cyberspace during open enrollment is at least on equal footing with face time, suggest two recent unpublished surveys of employees and carriers that sell voluntary benefit plans.

Overall, electronic health records are expected to reduce medical errors, but Dean Sittig has devoted a lot of research to the ways that EHRs themselves can fail.

A unit of brokerage powerhouse Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. waded deeper into the worksite market with one of eight acquisitions made since November 2009 to build a national platform that serves the employee benefits needs of middle-market companies.

Mutual of Omaha recently brought more than a century of disability income insurance market know-how to a new product offering in this area.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America’s new multi-coverage voluntary package features comprehensive benefits at a single rate that emphasizes affordability and enrollment simplicity.

Shopping for identity theft protection, a product that is gaining traction in the worksite market, is no easy feat. But a new Web site now makes it easy to compare half a dozen of the nascent industry’s leading service providers that are aggressively fighting this growing crime wave.

While the number of health savings accounts and health reimbursement arrangements increased in 2010, average individual account balances fell, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.