Healthcare reform

Walmart Stores Inc. the world’s biggest retail chain, plans to stop offering health benefits to employees who work less than 30 hours a week, a move that will affect about 2% of its U.S. staff.

Health care reform has changed the role of the adviser from insurance broker to that of a trusted adviser, counselor and compliance guru. Advisers hoping to thrive in this new environment will embrace the change less as a burden and more as an opportunity.

Can a cafeteria plan prevent an employee from heading to the exchange? New IRS direction clarifies mid-year changes for your client’s cafeteria plan participants.

Complicated and tedious ACA reporting requirements are forcing benefit advisers who want to stay relevant to adapt to a more automated way of doing business.

With the ACA’s employer mandate on the horizon, many employers with part-time and variable hour employees are also re-evaluating their benefit offerings for part-time employees.

Health care reform has presented employers plenty of new challenges to grapple with when it comes to offering health care coverage, and, many say, has expanded the critical role of benefit advisers who heed the call.

With the Affordable Care Act’s employer shared responsibility reporting requirements for 2015 quickly approaching, benefit advisers should already be working with employer clients to implement benefit administration systems to ensure compliance with the law, industry experts say.

As more and more companies are flooded with administrative duties due to the Affordable Care Act, cloud-based HR and benefits systems such as Zenefits are starting to gain a substantial hold in the employer market.

Those who purchase health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s state and federal exchanges will have more choices for coverage beginning in 2015, according to a Department of Health and Human Services report released Tuesday.

Health insurance premium rates are on the rise, a trend that could alter brokers’ selling strategies.

Adviser help is needed to encourage employers to adopt the FSA rollover allowance, which has demonstrated growth results for employee contributions and enrollment numbers.

Increased and unnecessary risks to Healthcare.gov security remain, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services has failed to implement and address security issues, the GAO says.

Predictions for 2014 open enrollment include more than 3 million employees being covered under private exchanges. Is this the new trend in employer-sponsored health care coverage?

About 115,000 people who signed up for Obamacare and may not be legal residents of the U.S. will lose their insurance coverage at the end of the month, the government said Monday.

Two major trends in employer-sponsored health care continue: a slower rate of premium increases and greater use of high-deductible health plans, especially among small employers, Kaiser study finds.

As private exchange providers introduce voluntary benefit offerings, how will broker commissions be affected?

CMS says small employers and their benefit advisers in select states will have early access to the ACA’s Small Business Health Options Program to test-drive the system, but not all are interested.

Ever since final rules under the Affordable Care Act dictated that outcomes-based wellness programs must offer reasonable alternatives to employees unable to achieve the program’s health benchmarks, employers have continued to worry over the effectiveness of their health improvement efforts.

Commentary: Under the ACA, clinical trials offer an expanding frontier for plan sponsors and insurers, says Symetra’s Marien Diaz.

The IRS has released long-awaited draft instructions for the forms employers will use to comply with the ACA’s employer mandate, giving benefit advisers and their clients a glimpse of the work ahead for 2015 and how to begin preparing now.