Healthcare plans

New legislation was issued last night in the Senate that would remove broker compensation from the MLR calculation.

The report card, developed by Catalyst for Payment Reform and the Health Care Incentives Improvement Initiative (HCI³), examined multiple transparency factors on a 100-point scale.

Consumer-driven health plans are not achieving long-term savings greater than what would be reached by raising the deductible on traditional PPOs, according to the 2012 UBA Health Plan Survey.

In a legislative session sponsored by the Society for Human Resource Management, benefits attorney Elizabeth Vollmar covered everything from in-house administration functions to avoiding financial exposure.

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction on PPACA’s contraception requirement, saying an employer’s First Amendment rights could be irreparably harmed if the mandate was enforced while a lawsuit was pending.

Under current guidance, “affordable” health care coverage for a family could get unaffordable fairly quickly, but is total household income even an issue for employers?

The increased accounts and balances were expected in a recent EBRI/MGA survey, but other analysts’ predictions are being confounded. For example, no real correlation was found between account balance and healthy behaviors.

The insurance industry is not very prepared for climate change, according to “Insurer Climate Risk Disclosure Survey: 2012 Findings & recommendations,” from the Ceres Coalition.

Nearly half of all health plan members in the group and individual markets nationwide say they are interested in using a state exchange to purchase health insurance, according to a new survey by J.D. Power and Associates.

While experts once predicted savings of as much as $81 billion a year from electronic records, U.S. health care spending has continued to increase, partly because of systems that don’t share information, they say.

By the time Astra Augustus left Virtua Memorial Hospital in New Jersey after the last of four surgeries, she’d run up about $255,000 in bills.

Life Technologies, a California-based medical research and life sciences company with more than 10,000 employees, shifted its workforce to a CDHP in 2010. Benefits leader Carole Mendoza says the education and communication effort for the change ran the gamut from bathroom newsletters (the old “porcelain press”) to blogs, webinars and social networks.

LIMRA reports that 47% of employers with 2-99 employees offer benefits, the lowest level in 20 years.

Some 29 states have so-called lifestyle laws that protect smokers’ rights.

A recent study finds wide variety between the lowest and highest charges for 10 common conditions, highlighting the unpredictability of health care costs.

Only 6% of those surveyed by Aon Hewitt plan to exit employer-sponsored health care entirely, but around 28% are eyeing the next three to five years for a move to a private health care exchange.

Buck Consultants announced this week that it would be starting a private health care exchange while Liazon unveiled a new web partnership to support its own.

The answer to that question is still fuzzy. That’s because while the Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed to Employee Benefit News that health reimbursement arrangements and health savings accounts will be offered on the public exchanges, the organization still hasn’t released the details and regulations surrounding these accounts.

UnitedHealth Group Inc., the biggest U.S. medical insurer, is set to face claims that it failed to properly oversee a Las Vegas doctor who gave colonoscopy patients hepatitis C by mishandling the anesthetic Propofol.

Americans say they’re filling up less on fast food and pizza, according to a U.S. survey.