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Employee Benefits Jobs
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Hand-picked links to the web's best news articles,
official guidance, jobs, webcasts and more.
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In Target's Wake, Businesses Prepare to React to Obamacare
"[S]ince many employers are still figuring out how to respond to the new law, it's worth discerning lessons from Target's announcement this week that it would stop offering coverage to part-time workers, give them $500, and advise them on signing up for health coverage on the new Obamacare exchanges.... Whether they keep offering coverage or push workers onto the exchange will depend on the state they're in, who their competitors are and what kinds of workers they want to attract, among other factors."
(Politico)
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More Cities Mandate Paid Sick Leave
"This month, Rhode Island became the third state to offer workers paid family leave. That's time off to care for a new baby or a loved one. Portland, Oregon, and Jersey City, New Jersey, are the latest in a small wave of cities mandating paid sick leave. Such laws cover both public and private sector workers, and a dozen more places are considering them."
(National Public Radio)
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Hospitals Pressured by ACA to Slash Costs, Improve Quality of Care
"The [ACA] also encourages doctors and hospitals to form 'accountable care organizations.' These networks of providers -- including primary care doctors, specialists, hospitals and home health care services -- work together to coordinate the patients' care. It's a different health care model than the 'fee-for-service' system that exists in the U.S. today -- in which economic incentives are built around providing more treatments, not fewer."
(San Jose Mercury News)
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To Cut Health Costs, Focus on the First 15 Minutes of Care
"Popular television shows ... have long dramatized how crucial early moments of care are for trauma victims. But what most don't realize is that very same principle -- that early, accurate intervention matters -- applies across the entire health care system, not just in trauma cases, but in nearly all cases. It is in the first 15 minutes of a medical encounter -- which, studies show, is the average amount of time that patients meet with their primary care physician -- that up to half of all medical costs are set in motion."
(Harvard Business Review blog; free registration required)
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One Simple Daily Intervention Decreases Employee Stress
"Stress levels and physical complaints declined by roughly 15% after employees were directed to spend 10 minutes writing about three things that had gone well each day, says a team of researchers ... At the end of the work day, the employees logged on to a website where they were asked to write about events large or small, personal or work-related, and explain why they had gone well."
(Harvard Business Review blog; free registration required)
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Hospitals Trade Association Says No Link Between Hospital Consolidation and Costs
"A Federation of American Hospitals-commissioned report claims, not surprisingly, that hospital consolidation improves care quality and access and that the critics who claim these 'hospital realignments' drive up healthcare costs are relying on old data that does not consider the sweeping effects of healthcare reform."
(HealthLeaders Media)
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ML Strategies Health Care Update, January 27, 2014 (PDF)
"Citing recent high profile data breaches at Target and others, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) outlined in a January memo similar concerns over security of health care data. House Republicans have made exchange data security a priority for some time, already holding four hearings this Congress on the issue."
(ML Strategies, LLC)
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GOP Senators' New Health Overhaul Plan Would Tax Some Workers' Benefits
"The proposal would not change the long-standing practice of allowing employers to fully deduct the cost of providing health insurance. However, some employees getting very generous coverage would have to pay taxes on the value of some benefits. The proposal would cap the tax exclusion for an employee's health coverage at 65 percent of an average plan's cost. 'This step is necessary and important, because economists across the political spectrum largely agree that the current distortion in the tax code helps to artificially inflate the growth in health care costs,' according to the Senate GOP blueprint."
(Kaiser Health News)
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Three Republicans Back ACA Alternative
"Three Senate Republicans on Monday proposed repealing the nation's controversial health care law in favor of a replacement that eliminates most of the government coverage mandates it imposed and offers tax breaks to help the lower-income obtain coverage.... The proposal repeals all of the tax increases that have taken effect with the new health care law, including one on medical devices and another on high-cost insurance plans. Yet it would impose a new one by limiting the tax exemption that individuals are allowed to take for the cost of their health insurance premiums."
(The Washington Post; subscription may be required)
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Employer Survey Reveals Five Payer Nuggets
"Employers continue to be frustrated with managing the compliance document review process, which includes waiting on payers to review [SPDs].... The importance of clear employee communications is critical, as 84 percent of respondents consider SPDs as both communications and compliance documents.... twice as many employers as last year cited content - finding writers who understand benefits and communication - as an issue... While there has been discussion about employers consolidating plan offerings, there was no indication of this based on survey results. In fact, 83 percent of respondents said they expected to produce the same number of SBCs in 2013 as they did in 2012."
(HighRoads)
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Modifications to New York City Earned Sick Leave Act Proposed
"[P]roposed modifications include ... [1] Employers with at least five, rather than 15, employees will be covered by the law.... [2] The exclusion for manufacturing businesses classified in sections 31, 32 and 33 of the North American Industry Classification System would be eliminated. [3] The relatives for whom an employee may take statutory leave for caretaking would expand to include siblings (including half siblings, step siblings, or siblings related through adoption), grandchildren and grandparents."
(Jackson Lewis LLP)
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Taking Health Management to a New Level: Employers Willing to Spend More
"U.S. employers believe that health management is helping to slow medical trend, and they are putting more emphasis on these programs ... Now more than half of large employers provide employees with financial incentives to participate, and a fifth reward employees for achieving or maintaining specific health targets. They're also making health improvement more fun with contests and challenges, and providing mobile apps to track activity."
(Mercer)
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Understanding the Role of Private Exchanges
"Simply put, a private exchange is a private business that sells health insurance online to employers. However, if you've seen one private exchange, you've seen one private exchange. Their offerings can vary: an exchange run by a single private insurer might offer only its own products, while a benefits consultant might offer plans from dozens of insurers. Private exchanges can also differ in their administrative efficiency, charges, and service, such as the quality of the support they offer customers in picking insurance plans."
(The Commonwealth Fund)
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Economists See Little Effect on Hiring from ACA
"About 75% of those surveyed said the [ACA] hasn't influenced their planning or expectations for 2014 ... Twenty-one percent of 64 respondents said that the law would have a negative impact on business conditions and 5% said it will be positive."
(Employee Benefit Adviser)
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[Opinion]
Summary of GOP Bill: The Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act
"Under [this] proposal, insurance companies would be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on a consumer.... [This] proposal would repeal [the individual] mandate ... To stabilize the market initially, [the] proposal would adopt an age rating ratio that limits the amount an older individual will pay to no more than five times what a younger individual pays in premium dollars (5 to 1) as a federal baseline, since the vast majority of states already utilized this rating ratio before Obamacare. This less restrictive rating ratio will have the effect of helping to immediately lower health care costs for millions of Americans."
(American Benefits Council)
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Benefits in General; Executive Compensation
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Benefits Litigation Update, Winter 2014 (PDF)
Articles include: [1] Will Section 510 of ERISA Restrict Workforce Structuring under the Affordable Care Act? [2] A New Threat to Sponsors and Fiduciaries: Equitable Remedies After Amara Presumption Revisited; [3] First ERISA Decision From Supreme Court This Term Strongly Endorses Plan-Created Limitations Periods For Benefit Claims; and[4] Class Action Fee Litigation Continues to Plague Plan Sponsors.
(Epstein Becker Green)
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Text of District Court Opinion Finding SPD's Language Enforceable Despite Amara
"Amara does not support the broad proposition urged by the Estate, i.e. that an SPD can never serve as an ERISA plan document. As recently as May, 2011, notably in a decision rendered just two days after Amara, the Sixth Circuit recognized that where there is no formal ERISA plan separate and apart from the SPD, the SPD is the relevant plan document ... Amara does nothing to change the analysis and conclusion in this case. At the heart of Amara is the requirement that there be a conflict between the language of the SPD and the controlling plan document before the terms of the SPD can be ignored or overriden." [L&W Associates Welfare Benefit Plan v. Estate of Terance R. Wines, No. 12-cv-13524 (E.D. Mich. Jan. 13, 2014)]
(U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan)
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Press Releases
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