Health and wellness

CMS says benefit brokers and advisers are expected to be able to enroll their small business clients on the federal SHOP exchange online by sometime later this year.

To effectively address the reality of the widespread implications of obesity, employers must think beyond wellness programs. They must apply a wide-angle lens to employee health, wellness and even risk.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced training and registration dates, along with requirements, for benefit advisers and brokers who want to enroll small business employers on the federally facilitated SHOP exchange.

Benefit advisers are poised to close the gap between employers’ need to control health costs and comply with the health law and employees’ lack of interest in taking ownership of their health care choices.

Benefit insiders predict a steep decline in small business group health insurance sales in the coming years, which could prove harmful for many independent brokers and agents.

The IRS this month clarified for benefit advisers and their clients that employers cannot escape ACA penalties and taxes via pre-tax premium reimbursement plans.

Benefits managers struggle to measure the real returns on wellness initiatives; achieving the goals of cost savings, cost avoidance and employee engagement requires a well-orchestrated plan. But it's not an impossible task.

Benefit broker compensation problems, an existing health law and a tough exchange board have forced advisers in this state to take a backseat to the implementation of Obamacare.

If your wellness program consists of a health risk assessment and nothing else, you may be missing the bigger picture. While the tools can yield important information, they may ignore broader factors in employees’ lives that are influencing the unhealthy behavior.

Commentary: An additional option is available for certain consumers to continue to enroll in the ACA marketplaces, guest blogger Laura Kerekes explains.

Evidence shows that more insurers bring down premiums on the ACA exchanges, which could ease conversations benefit brokers have with the uninsured about affordability of coverage.

Final regulations implementing the ACA’s nondiscrimination rules for wellness programs became effective in January, but many employers are still unclear about how the regulations have changed. The changes are subtle, but noncompliance can carry heavy penalties.

With lack of information and resources deterring most of the uninsured who did not enroll for coverage on the exchanges in 2014, advisers are poised to play a pivotal role in 2015.

Workplace stress is a worldwide issue, with new data indicating stressed-out employees are a contributing factor to the global rise in health care costs.

After a backlash from the broker and agent community, final rules on this topic show some changes from the government agency.

Variable hour and other part-time employee determinations are tough. Here’s how to advise your employer clients on what to do and what not to do.

After the exchange board moved this week to switch their state-run marketplace to the Feds’ model, brokers were cautiously optimistic about the next step because the last open enrollment experience was a “nightmare” and “fiasco.”

In follow-up to two broker-friendly bills introduced in late March, a group of five U.S. Democratic senators are asking the agency again for changes that will help ACA-certified agents better enroll consumers.

While certain health and wellness campaigns lend themselves to gender-specific messaging – mammograms or prostate cancer, for example – positioning health and benefits communication to male and female employees differently isn’t commonplace.

Even though more than one-in-four Americans have received treatment or therapy from a mental health professional, few people know that health insurers are required to provide coverage for mental health, behavioral health and substance-use disorders that is comparable to coverage for physical health.