Health and wellness

Statins will be recommended for almost 33 million Americans, about twice the number under previous guidelines. Heart disease is the No. 1 killer worldwide, accounting for 1 in 4 U.S. deaths.

While confusion and acrimony dominate discussions over Healthcare.gov, HR sources are reporting few if any concerns from their workforce populations, most of whom are snug and secure in their employer-sponsored health care.

As few as 20 or 30 enrollments per state per day are greeting the Obamacare marketplaces. With more congressional hearings on the rollout of the Affordable Care Act set to start tomorrow in the House, will lawmakers get some answers?

Walgreen Co. become the latest large employer to make significant changes to its employee health plan when it announced that it will move approximately 160,000 of its employees onto a private health insurance exchange, starting in 2014. The strategy is starting to look like a trend: Over the last several months, IBM, Time Warner, Sears Holdings and Darden Restaurants have all made similar announcements.

As the president directs aides to look for solutions to the health plan cancellations, the White House’s chief technology officer will appear before Congress this week after being subpoenaed to do so.

Nearly one in five doesn't even know if their company has a wellness program. Are your workers entirely ignorant of your offerings?

Even if their employees don't use the exchanges, their functioning depends pretty heavily on some critical interactions among exchanges, employers, and their employees.

These two new reporting requirements are in addition to the current requirement to report the cost of coverage on Form W-2.

Employee benefits attorneys share how employers facing Affordable Care Act reforms can think outside the box for health plan changes in 2014.

“What I really believe is that no company in the corporate wellness space is truly taking advantage of the power of mobile technology to build mobile-first wellness programs for employees and corporations,” says Dr. Rajiv Kumar, ShapeUp’s founder and CEO.

The Affordable Care Act and the troubled launch of the federal insurance exchange have bolstered the business case for data sharing and consumer engagement, according to eHealth Initiative's latest survey of health information exchange systems.

After Tuesday’s news that CMS wants to recruit more brokers to enroll consumers on Healthcare.gov, the group made the first public announcement Wednesday about a broker-focused website improvement.

Despite taking Healthcare.gov offline for hours a day to make technological fixes, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said Wednesday the site continued to experience multiple slowdowns and displayed error messages to numerous visitors throughout the day.

Employers and HR professionals will have to come to terms with the most common (but hopefully not absolutely systemic) reality for employees: rates will, in some cases, go up. That’s a simple fact of life, and you can blame the ACA all you want, but the truth is that health care rates were likely to inch marginally anyhow.

If people with chronic conditions only spend about an hour a year with their physician, how can they stay adherent with medication and their disease education for the 8,759 hours they’re outside the doctor’s office? The most promising answer is through mobile devices.

The majority of employers questioned by the NEBGH cite “employees’ poor health habits” as one of their top three obstacles to maintaining affordable health coverage.

Following the Oct. 1 launch of the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges, nearly half (48%) of Americans nationwide say the federal government did a “poor” job of implementing the law in a new Kaiser survey.

As the Obama administration works to fix the technological problems associated with Healthcare.gov, greater issues with the federal health care exchanges remain, said a panel of health care experts Thursday in Washington.

A debrief on the types of changes that trigger the loss of grandfathered status, the concept at the center of the “if you like your plan, you can keep it” issue.

With the online site expected to face difficulties through November, Americans may have only weeks to find replacement coverage, and many may end up paying higher premiums.