Healthcare reform

Long-term care (LTC) insurance is back in the headlines, with several leading insurance carriers seeking rate increases to help offset investment shortfalls in an ultra-low interest rate environment and greater-than-expected plan usage.

Following sweeping Republican gains in the 2010 midterm election, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) underlined his belief that the election was a referendum against health care reform. "That means that we can — and should — propose and vote on straight repeal, repeatedly," McConnell said of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in a Nov. 4 speech at the Heritage Foundation. …

Flush with victory from election night, Republican strategists are delving into possible measures to repeal or significantly hamper existing health care reform legislation.

Of course, everyone is fighting tooth and nail to retain grandfathered status for their health plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and rightly so.

Like Santa, I imagine you’ll be making a list and checking it twice (20 times?) to make sure you have all your talking points in order so you can communicate effectively to employees how the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect their benefits enrollment options.

Of all the things employers have to worry about since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—and there are quite a few — it’s understandably the Cadillac tax on high-cost health benefit plans that has them the most concerned, according to new survey results from Mercer.

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.

Short post today, because I’m working full-steam ahead to bring you a whiz-bang April EBN. (Small trade pub trade secret: We work as many as 12 weeks in advance of publication. So send me your ideas now for EBN May!)

Americans work longer hours than people in most other developed countries, including renowned workaholics in Japan. As a result, work-family conflict is much higher in the United States than in other nations.

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.

Panicking about the impact of health care reform legislation? Chances are, your benefit consulting firm has already developed a proprietary tool for this very occasion.

With compromise in the air on Capitol Hill during the holiday season, the stage is set for health care reform legislation passing the House and Senate before boardrooms across Corporate America wrestle with any unintended consequences.

I’ve long maintained that President Obama’s statement on health care reform that “If you like your coverage and your doctor, you can keep it,” was naïve at best and an outright lie at worst.

Yes, according to The Fund for Personal Liberty. The organization is backing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of mandatory Medicare enrollment, and says it will do the same against a national individual mandate, should such a directive be a result of health care reform legislation.