Healthcare plans

One-third of recently surveyed physician practices and 14% of surveyed hospitals do not conduct a regular security risk analysis of their electronic health information.

After some pretty dour retirement news last Friday, I’m afraid I have more Gloomy Gus news today — this time related to health care.

For any employers leaning toward letting workers shop for health coverage in state-run exchanges come 2014, there’s encouraging news from a recent survey from Extend Health.

It’s gotta be tough to lead a major health insurance carrier (except for the high salary, of course). Insurance companies generally are vilified by the mainstream press, disliked by consumers and now there’s news that employers don’t like them much either.

Ouida Peterson is to benefits what Paula Deen is to cooking – except maybe without all the sugar and butter. Don’t let the charming Southern drawl fool you.

Although many tea-leaf readers predicted that health care reform would spur employers to drop health benefits, a new poll of nearly 3,700 executives by Crain Communications shows such forecasts may have been based more on fear than fact.

We have another podcast post today, this time with Heather Gatley, executive vice president of HR Services and general counsel for AlphaStaff.

So, we’ve had some time to start to digest the biggest components of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, when they go into effect and the implications for your health plans.

So, I promised that we’d get back to analyzing health care reform, and I am a woman of my word. We’re going to do things a little different today, though, and make today’s post a listen instead of a read.

Forgive me, pros. I’m a little bleary-eyed today, since I stayed up until after midnight to get the official vote tally (219-210, by the way) and real-time analysis of Sunday’s House vote on health care reform.

If you made it through the headline without bile rising in your throat, you’ve already done better than me.

What a difference one special election makes. In the wake of Scott Brown’s upset victory in Tuesday's special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy, all the stories about health care reform this morning involve needles — and not the hypodermic kind.

A recent report in The Washington Post reveals that Sen. Edward Kennedy's health care reform proposal involves mandates both for employees and employers, similar to the health care system in Kennedy's home state of Massachusetts. It's no secret that employers are solidly against a mandate for businesses to chip in for the cost of health insurance, so I encourage you to make your voice heard on Sen. Kennedy's plan. According to the Post, he plans…

In a recent article written for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, authors Chuck Marr and Kris Cox suggest that "Congress should consider scaling back or eliminating health care flexible spending accounts as part of its effort to pay for health care reform." Among their reasons for deep-sixing FSAs, Marr and Cox say: * FSAs encourage excess utilization of health care. * FSAs' 'use or lose it' requirement promotes wasteful spending. * FSAs complicate…