Employee Benefits Jobs
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Webcasts and Conferences
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Hand-picked links to the web's best news articles, official guidance, jobs, webcasts and more.
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[Guidance Overview]
IRS E-File Application Process for ACA Providers (PDF)
44 presentation slides newly available online, dated December 9, 2013. Excerpt: "All Responsible Official(s) and Delegated User(s) within your corporation who will be responsible for e-filing your ACA related and/or creating or maintaining your corporate IRS e-file Application will need to individually register with e-Services. Registration is a one-time, universal process that authenticates you and allows you to do business electronically with IRS. Once you have successfully registered and confirmed you are ready to begin the e-file application process for your corporation."
(Internal Revenue Service)
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[Advert.]
23rd Annual National Health Benefits Conference & Expo - Jan. 28-29, FL
Hear Here: Sprint, L.L. Bean, We Energies, City of Houston, Eastman Chemical, Univ. of IA, AL & S.FL, Palm Beach Co Schools, Crowley Maritime Corp, Anoka Co, S. Shore Hospital, more. Jan 28-29 - Hi quality, moderate cost. Complete Program brochure online now!
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[Guidance Overview]
IRS E-Services Registration for ACA Providers (PDF)
24 presentation slides newly available online, dated December 9, 2013. Excerpt: "All ACA report filers and tax professionals who wish to e-file reports must register online to create an individual electronic account with e- Services. The registration process is a one-time automated process where the user selects a username, password and PIN."
(Internal Revenue Service)
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Small Businesses Weigh Sending Sick Workers to Obamacare Exchanges
"Can an employer pay chronically ill workers to leave the company health plan and get insurance somewhere else? ... The potential loophole in the [ACA] could threaten the viability of Obamacare marketplaces if they get the most expensive-to-insure workers while companies keep healthier employees on their own plans. Some mid-sized companies that self-insure ... are at least talking about the idea."
(Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
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Study Raises Questions for Employer Wellness Programs
"[Wellness] programs have become increasingly popular, as companies aim to lower their medical costs and lift productivity by promoting healthier behavior among workers. About half of employers with at least 50 workers offer them, as do 90 percent of employers with more than 50,000 employees ... [A recent] study by RAND researchers and executives of PepsiCo ... found that programs aimed at helping people with chronic illnesses stay healthy, by educating them and reminding them to take medication, resulted in significant cost savings. But so-called lifestyle management offerings, which aim to reduce health risks through programs focusing on weight loss or stress management, resulted in no net savings at all."
(The New York Times; subscription may be required)
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Workplace Wellness Programs Can Cut Chronic Illness Costs; Savings for Lifestyle Improvements Are Smaller
"The current RAND study provides an assessment of over seven years of PepsiCo's Healthy Living wellness program.... [T]he disease management program reduced costs among participants by $136 per member per month, or $1,632 annually, driven by a 29 percent drop in hospital admissions. Among people who participated in both the disease management and lifestyle management programs, the savings were $160 per month with a 66 percent drop in hospital admissions. People who participated in the lifestyle management program reported a small reduction in absenteeism, but there was no significant effect on health care costs."
(RAND Corporation)
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Text of 11th Circuit Opinion: Disability Insurer Must Consider Social Security Evidence (PDF)
"Notwithstanding the normal operation of this burden of proof, the Policy terms that required Melech to apply for SSDI and LINA's seemingly self-interested disregard for her SSDI application give us pause. We find nothing necessarily troubling in the terms of LINA's Policy that allow it to benefit from the SSA's alternative compensation mechanism. Nor do we take issue with the lengths LINA has gone to to ensure that its claimants apply for SSDI, or even LINA's right to second guess an SSA denial. However, in light of these openly self-interested efforts, we are troubled by the implication of LINA's actions in Melech's case, where it ignored her SSDI application and the evidence generated by the SSA's investigation once it no longer had a financial stake in the outcome." [Melech v. Life Insurance Company of North America, et al., No. 1:10-cv-00573-KD-M (11th Cir. Jan. 6, 2014)]
(U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit)
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Effect of Health Reform for 50- to 64-Year-Olds (PDF)
"Most people in this age group are covered through employers, so employers' decisions about health benefits shape their options. For those who have modest incomes and who currently buy coverage in the individual market, the reforms may help make coverage more affordable and remove obstacles for anyone with health problems. For those who are uninsured now, ACA improves access to private and public coverage and offers financial help for people with low incomes."
(AARP Public Policy Institute)
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Medical Debt Among People with Health Insurance
"This report identifies common causes and consequences of medical debt, and discusses the triggers of medical debt that will and will not be affected by the Affordable Care Act. It finds that health plan cost-sharing is a primary contributor to medical debt. Even relatively modest cost sharing can prove unaffordable because expenses often are unexpected and most Americans have less than $3,000 on hand to cover such costs. For many, unaffordable cost-sharing may be compounded by other factors[.]"
(Kaiser Family Foundation)
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Rate of Health Spending Growth Remained Low for the Fourth Consecutive Year in 2012
"For the fourth consecutive year, growth in health care spending remained low, increasing by 3.7 percent in 2012 to $2.8 trillion. At the same time, the share of the economy devoted to health fell slightly (from 17.3 percent to 17.2 percent) as the nominal gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 4.6 percent. Faster growth in hospital services and in physician and clinical services was mitigated by slower growth in prices for prescription drugs and nursing home services.... Growth in private health insurance spending also remained near historically low rates in 2012, largely influenced by the nation's modest economic recovery and its impact on enrollment."
(Office of the Actuary, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)
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Why U.S. Health Spending Has Slowed Down
"Two temporary changes that the U.S. won't be able to count on in future years helped hold down the rate of health spending in 2012. First, there's what the pharmaceutical industry calls the patent cliff. Blockbuster drugs such as Lipitor have lost patent protection, opening the market to lower-cost generic competitors and helping hold spending on prescription drugs to a 0.4 percent increase between 2011 and 2012. A one-time cut in what Medicare pays nursing homes also took effect in 2012."
(Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
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National Health Spending Growth Remains Low for Fourth Consecutive Year
"[H]ealth care spending in the United States grew at a rate of 3.7 percent in 2012 to $2.8 trillion. That level of annual growth is similar to spending growth rates since 2009, which increased between 3.6 percent and 3.8 percent annually. This means that growth during all four years has occurred at the slowest rates ever recorded in the fifty-three-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts."
(Health Affairs Blog)
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[Opinion]
'Cruddy' Plans Are Actually the Healthcare Solution
"Obama has it exactly backward. He wants to mandate a high level of coverage to pay for ordinary health-care expenses, which makes the cost of health insurance expensive and deters young, healthy people from participating. That exorbitant cost ultimately is shouldered by taxpayers in the form of higher taxes, which slows down the economy. Instead, we should be making cheaper insurance more widely available, encouraging patients to be stingy consumers and allowing a variety of insurance products to be offered in the free market."
(The Washington Post; subscription may be required)
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[Opinion]
Obamacare Health Insurance Has 'Networks' -- But Why Are There Any Networks at All?
"Why do health insurers have networks at all? Auto insurers have preferred auto-body repair shops, but it's not quite the same thing. You may think that your auto insurer has comparative advantage over you in determining the quality of work at a particular shop. However, you can go to any shop, get an estimate, and report it to your insurer. By default, most auto insurers pay the insured party (or lien holder), unless the insured party directs the insurer to pay the repair shop directly. Most importantly, there are no huge cost surprises after the repair. For hospitalization, it can take months or years to figure out how much a discharged patient owes[.]"
(John Goodman's Health Policy Blog)
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[Opinion]
It's Time to Rethink Health Insurance
"Insurance is about protecting against risk. In the health arena, the risk at issue is of large and unexpected medical expenses. The proper role of health insurance should be to finance necessary and expensive medical services without the patient incurring devastating financial consequences. Over the last decade, however, Americans have come to expect their health insurance to subsidize the consumption of all medical care."
(Los Angeles Times)
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[Opinion]
Will There Be an Obamacare Death Spiral in 2015?
"[H]ealth plans, because they are so insulated from big losses, will generally stand pat with their 2014 rate structures for 2015 -- no matter how bad the early claims experience looks.... [T]he health insurance industry will be content to give the Obama administration one more chance to reboot Obamacare in the fall of 2014, when the 2015 open enrollment takes place.... While they will continue to be protected from losses in 2016, two years will be enough patience for them and they will be eager to at least begin to transition their rates to the proper level in 2016 rather than face a huge adjustment in 2017 when the reinsurance program ends."
(Bob Laszewski's Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review)
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[Opinion]
Boston Must Rein in Retiree Health Plans
"[In] 2011 Boston reported an unfunded deficit of $3 billion for its [retiree health (RH)] plan, an ostensible decrease from $4 billion in 2009. In fact, if Boston had not raised by two full percentage points its assumed expected returns on current and future plan assets, its unfunded RH plan deficit would have increased from $4 billion in 2009 to approximately $5 billion in 2011."
(The Brookings Institution)
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Benefits in General; Executive Compensation
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[Guidance Overview]
DOL and Treasury Update 2013-2014 Regulatory Agendas for Employee Benefits
Article contains a chart that lists all benefits-related items in the Agendas for these two agencies, along with the date each item was added to the agenda, and, for DOL items, the projected completion date. There are three new DOL initiatives and no new tax initiatives. Projects relating to the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act are not listed on the agendas.
(Sutherland)
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When Do Severance Payments Constitute 'Wages'?
"Quality Stores thus presents the Court with questions of varying breadth and implication. Most immediately, the Court must resolve whether these disputed SUB payments are 'wages' under FICA -- a legally narrow issue, but one with substantial revenue implications.... But the case also presents broader questions about the Court's approach to statutory interpretation: Should its analysis effectively start and end with the statutory text actually at issue[?]" [United States v. Quality Stores, Inc., Supreme Court Docket No. 12-1408; oral argument scheduled for January 14, 2014.]
(SCOTUSblog)
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Fiduciary Liability Insurance: Am I Protected?
"If you have directors' and officers' coverage, are you sure that coverage extends to your acts as an ERISA fiduciary? ... Are the limits on the extent of that coverage separate from the D&O limits [or] within those limits? This can be a big problem when the carrier tells you reach the limits of what it is contractually obligated to pay. When does the coverage begin? ... Who is insured? ... Do you understand who is not insured?"
(Fiduciary Plan Governance, LLC)
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As Healthcare Law Affects Insurance Rates, 401(k) Saving Drops
"While participants in general are more optimistic about the economy, they are planning to save slightly less over the next 12 months, and those over the age of 50 have lowered their expected savings amounts by about 18%.... Participants clearly see trouble ahead in achieving a comfortable retirement. Nothing exemplifies this better than a retirement concern that was barely on the map a few years ago: paying for health care in retirement."
(CPA Practice Advisor)
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Press Releases
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