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Employee Benefits Jobs
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Webcasts and Conferences
Contributions, Section 415 and Post-severance
January 14, 2014 WEBCAST
(McKay Hochman Co., Inc.)
HMA Expert Roundtable
January 15, 2014 WEBCAST
(Health Management Associates)
Ethics for Benefits Professionals
January 21, 2014 in CA
(Western Pension & Benefits Council - San Diego Chapter)
Designated Roth Accounts and Roth Conversions
January 22, 2014 WEBCAST
(McKay Hochman Co., Inc.)
PBM Contracts: How to Use Audits and Market Checks to Improve Your Bottom Line
January 28, 2014 WEBCAST
(Atlantic Information Services, Inc)
COBRA Notices for Rookies: Informing Participants and Protecting the Plan
January 30, 2014 WEBCAST
(Thomson Reuters / EBIA)
The Future of the Small-Group Market: How Insurers Can Retain or Grow Their Small-Employer Business
January 30, 2014 WEBCAST
(Atlantic Information Services, Inc)
Top 10 Plan Designs for the Small Employer, and Creative Plan Corrections  Kansas City
January 30, 2014 in KS
(SunGard Relius)
Health Savings Accounts
February 19, 2014 WEBCAST
(Lorman Education Services)
11th Annual World Health Care Congress (WHCC)
April 7, 2014 in MD
(World Congress)
Retirement Income Summit
May 12, 2014 in IL
(InvestmentNews)
View All 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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[Official Guidance]
Text of CMS Announcement: Changes to Enrollment Data Authorized for Issuers (PDF)
"The Marketplace is the official System of Record, and as such, enrollees should make changes/updates/corrections to their application through the Marketplace. As we progress to online functionality to accommodate application changes, the Marketplace is establishing an interim short-term policy to allow enrollees to make certain specific changes to their enrollment data directly with issuers.... Enrollees who desire to add dependents as a result of birth, adoption, or placement for adoption, should contact the [qualified health plan (QHP)] issuer's call center.... Enrollees can contact the QHP issuer to make changes and/or corrections to certain data that do not affect eligibility for coverage in a QHP or eligibility for [advanced premium tax credit (APTC) or cost-sharing reductions (CSRs)]. QHP issuers are permitted to implement those changes within their own systems as necessary."
[Editor's note: the announcement is unnumbered and shows no specific publication date.]
(Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
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[Advert.]
Intuitive, web-based Welfare Plan Document Solutions
Simplify the time-consuming tasks involved in plan document administration with ftwilliam.com. Provide quick and accurate service for your clients whether you're preparing Cafeteria, HRA, POP, Wrap or Section 132 plan documents.
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[Guidance Overview]
IRS Guidance Addresses Same-Sex Spouse Issues for Cafeteria Plans and HSAs (PDF)
"A calendar year plan may permit an employee's FSA to reimburse covered expenses incurred by a same-sex spouse back to January 1, 2013. Employers should consider communicating this change to employees. Although employees might not have made their FSA elections anticipating that their same-sex spouses' expenses would be eligible for reimbursement, it will be good news for those with balances remaining in their FSA s at the end of the plan year."
(Buck Consultants)
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[Guidance Overview]
Proposed HIPAA Health Plan Certification Rules Include Extended Deadline
"The proposed regulations would extend by two years (from December 31, 2013 to December 31, 2015) the deadline by which most health plans must satisfy the first certification of compliance requirements under the HIPAA electronic transaction rules, reflecting that a plan has completed certain levels of internal and external testing. The proposed rules include penalties for plans that do not meet the certification requirement."
(Practical Law Company)
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[Guidance Overview]
Marketplace Payment Processing: Restatement and Payment Reporting (PDF)
44 presentation slides, dated January 7, 2014. Excerpt: "This Marketplace Payment Processing Session will: [1] Provide submitters with instructions for: [a] Stating the current month's enrollment and payment data, and [b] Restating prior months' enrollment and payment data; and [2] Provide an overview of the monthly payment report for Advance Payments of the Premium Tax Credit (APTC) and Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) payments."
(Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
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HHS to Strengthen Enforcement of HIPAA Transaction Rules
"HHS acknowledged that the industry has experienced challenges in implementing HIPAA administrative simplification requirements, including the ICD-10 diagnostic code set, version 5010 of the HIPAA transaction standards, and the eligibility and claims status operating rules. In the past, HHS has responded to industry requests for additional time by delaying implementation or relaxing enforcement of the rules ... [T]he government has decided to mandate certification of compliance with the operating rules, but plans won't have to submit the required documentation until Dec. 31, 2015."
(InformationWeek)
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Obamacare Support Weakens, Workers Pinched
"64 percent of those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 per year say they've had more money withheld from their pay for health insurance, compared with only 38 percent of people making less than $30,000. 34 percent of rural Americans with health insurance through work say they have less choice of doctors, while just 18 percent of urban dwellers and 16 percent of suburbanites say that. 20 percent of part-time workers say they've lost coverage for a spouse or child, versus just 5 percent of those employed full-time."
(Bankrate)
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Text of Ohio State Appellate Court Opinion: City of Cincinnati Can Change Its Medical Benefits for Retirees (PDF)
"This case involves a group of employees who participated in an early-retirement program offered by the city of Cincinnati. The issue is whether the city violated its agreement with them when city council passed an ordinance that allowed other retirees who had retired previously to receive better medical benefits than those who participated in the early-retirement program. The trial court determined that it had, but we disagree. We conclude that the agreement that the city executed with participants in the early-retirement program was unambiguous, and that nothing in the agreement guaranteed a certain level of medical benefits or prohibited the city from modifying retiree medical benefits. We therefore reverse the judgment of the trial court and enter judgment for the city." [Bates et al. v. City of Cincinnati, No. C-130145 (Ohio App. Dec. 24, 2013)]
(Court of Appeals for the First Appellate District of Ohio, Hamilton County, Ohio)
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1-In-3 Obamacare Small Business Health Plans Exceed Deductible Limit
"The [ACA] contains a stipulation that caps the deductibles on small group health plans. For individual enrollees, the maximum deductible was limited to $2,000 while for families the maximum deductible was limited to $4,000.... For individual enrollees in SHOP marketplace plans, HealthPocket found: 96.43% of Bronze plans had deductibles over the $2,000 cap; 28.10% of Silver plans had deductibles over the $2,000 cap; [and] 6.48% of Gold plans had deductibles over the $2,000 cap."
(HealthPocket)
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Walmart Health Plan Is Cheaper, Offers More Coverage Than Obamacare
"For many years, the giant discount retailer has been the target of unions and liberal activists who have harshly criticized the company's health care plans, calling them 'notorious for failing to provide health benefits' and 'substandard.' But a [recent] comparison of the two health insurance programs found that Walmart's plan is more affordable and provides significantly better access to high-quality medical care than Obamacare."
(Washington Examiner)
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Cracking the Code on Health Care Costs: What the States Can Do
"State governments have a unique opportunity to transform the current health care system into one that provides higher-quality care at lower costs. The State Health Care Cost Containment Commission was created to identify how states might use their authorities and policy levers to guide this transformation.... The goal envisioned by the Commission is straightforward but ambitious: Replace the nation's reliance on fragmented, fee-for-service care with comprehensive, coordinated care using payment models that hold organizations accountable for cost control and quality gains. Achieving this will take time."
(Health Affairs Blog)
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Nonprofit Health Centers Go Into For-Profit Insurance Business
"A number of community health centers have already formed nonprofit Medicaid health plans, including ones in California, Rhode Island and New York.... [M]ore are looking at that business model as a result of two overlapping trends: the increasing number of people eligible for Medicaid under the federal health law and state decisions to shift enrollees into managed care plans."
(Kaiser Health News)
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Education Leaders Share Their Obamacare Challenges
"In an effort to learn more about how the law is affecting students, K-12 classrooms, and college campuses, the House Education and the Workforce Committee is calling for feedback from education stakeholders nationwide. Professors, teachers, and administrators are responding with stories of the hurdles they are now struggling to overcome[.]"
(Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives)
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Medicare Pricing Drives High Healthcare Costs
"Medicare may be best known for paying the medical bills for millions of people 65 and older, but recent studies show it plays another gargantuan role in American health care: It helps determine prices for everyone.... Medicare prices are sometimes based on faulty premises, offer perverse incentives for unnecessary care and provide widely varying amounts for equivalent drugs.... [T]he influence of Medicare prices means that those faults may be replicated throughout U.S. health care."
(The Washington Post; subscription may be required)
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Think America Has the World's Best Health Care System? You Won't After Seeing This Chart
"Americans lose three times as many years of life to infectious diseases as the average OECD country and [lose] twice as many years to metabolic diseases. There are some categories in which America used to lose fewer years of life than other countries back a few decades ago. But, ever since the 1980s, that hasn't happened. How did we end up here? Here's [one] attempt at an explanation, ... which lays blame at the very fragmented structure of the American health-care system[.]"
(Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post; subscription may be required)
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[Opinion]
Former HHS Head Offers His Take on ACA's Problems
"The administration needs to come up with the 60 percent workaround. That is, they've got to find a simple way to solve a complex problem, which will have imperfections for everyone.... One strategy that appears to be playing out here is the administration appears to be saying we'll sacrifice in the short run the actuarial soundness of this program, relying on the balance sheets of insurance companies with assurances that we will make it up to them later. But there's not a lot of trust between the administration and insurance companies."
(Kaiser Health News)
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[Opinion]
ACA Caps on Medicare Spending Will Not Control Healthcare Costs
"The real per capita growth rate for Medicare has been set in the [ACA] at a rate a little higher than the real per capita growth rate for GDP, indefinitely into the future. In other words, Medicare is going to grow at approximately the same rate as our income.... [But] there is no law that restricts overall health care spending. We've imposed a global budget on health care for the elderly and the disabled, but we've imposed no global budget on anyone else. If the past is a guide, per capita health spending will growth at twice the rate of per capita income, in real terms -- meaning that Medicare rates will fall increasingly behind the rates paid by all other payers."
(John Goodman's Health Policy Blog)
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[Opinion]
'Accountable Care' Model Revives HMO Strategy, Boding Ill for Patients, Physicians
"The HMO model, touted as a cost-saving strategy (as are today's ACOs), was sometimes associated with flagrant abuses ... Although supporters of today's ACO model assert that the new structures will have safeguards against the cherry-picking healthy patients and care denials that characterized HMOs, the authors [of a recent article] write that the early HMO proponents made virtually identical promises."
(Physicians for a National Health Program [PNHP])
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Press Releases
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