Team Manager - DC Compliance
Charles Schwab
in OH, TX

Conversion Specialist I
Verisight, Inc.
in CA

Senior Investment Analyst (Trades)
The Newport Group
in FL

401K Client Service Representative
Ascensus
in PA

401K Account Manager
Ascensus
in PA

401K Account Executive
Ascensus
in MN

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Overview of the 2013 Cumulative List of Changes in Plan Qualification Phone Forum
March 13, 2014 WEBCAST
(Internal Revenue Service (IRS))

HSAs, HRAs, and Consumer-Driven Health Care
April 23, 2014 in CA
(Thomson Reuters / EBIA)

Health Care Reform
April 24, 2014 in CA
(Thomson Reuters / EBIA)

Basics of Qualified Retirement Plans
April 24, 2014 WEBCAST
(ASC Institute)

Plan Loans and In-Service Distributions
May 15, 2014 WEBCAST
(ASC Institute)

View All Webcasts and Conferences

[Guidance Overview]

Don't Let ACA Excise Taxes Blindside You
"ACA imposes an excise tax of $100 per day per affected individual for certain violations. Calculated annually, the total potential excise tax with respect to a single individual for a continuous violation of a single requirement could be $36,500 -- which dwarfs the annual pay or play penalty. The excise tax applies to a multitude of health care reform requirements." (Winston & Strawn LLP)  

[Advert.]

11th Annual Employer Summit on Cracking Health Care Costs - April 5-7 - National Harbor, MD

Top thought leaders and forward-thinking employers discuss how to integrate current work in the employee wellness space with new initiatives, like narrow networks and direct contracting, to produce a true and measurable decrease in health costs. BLINK3 for discount.

[Guidance Overview]

ACA Employer Mandate Final Regs Released; Enforcement Delays Provided for Mid-Sized Employers
"The final regulations preserve several safe harbors that are designed to make it easier for employers to determine whether the coverage they offer is affordable to employees. These safe harbors permit employers to use the Form W-2 wages they pay, their employees' hourly rates, or the federal poverty level in determining whether employer coverage is affordable under the ACA. The Treasury Department clarified a few outstanding questions on how these safe harbors should be administered." (Ballard Spahr LLP)  

[Guidance Overview]

IRS Issues Final ACA Employer Mandate Regulations: Transition Relief and New Guidance Should Be Helpful to Many Employers
"For many employers, it will make practical sense to use a 12-month stability period ... [which] usually dictates that the preceding measurement period also must be 12-months long. However, for the stability period that begins in 2015, employers may adopt a transition measurement period that is shorter than 12 months but that is no less than six months. The transition measurement period must begin no later than July 1, 2014 and must end no earlier than 90 days before the first day of the 2015 plan year (90 days being the maximum permissible administrative period)." (Bond, Schoeneck & King)  

Overview of SHOP Elements: 2015 Draft Letter to FFM Issuers (PDF)
22 presentation slides. Excerpt: "Facilitation of employee choice at a single metal level of coverage ... selected by the employer is a required SHOP function in all 50 States and DC as of plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2015. Qualified employers will have the choice to offer employees all QHPs at a single metal level of coverage, or a single QHP. As proposed in the 2015 Payment Notice, qualified employers can offer employees a choice of all stand-alone dental plans, or a single stand-alone dental plan.... The FF-SHOP will be the enrollment and payment system of record for all 2015 FF-SHOP plan year enrollments. Employers will receive one bill and make one payment to the FF-SHOP." (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)  

Text of District Court Opinion Finding that SPD Description of Conversion Rights Not Mandated by ERISA (PDF)
"Plaintiff argues that plan participants would not ... understand that 'conversion' referred to the ability to change a group policy into an individual life insurance policy. Unfortunately for Plaintiff, the provisions in the SPD about the conversion privilege are indisputably written in a user-friendly manner with clear language. Even if this were not true, Plaintiff cannot establish that Defendants committed any violation of their ERISA duties with respect to the SPD. The statute simply does not require that the SPD even include notification to participants and beneficiaries of any conversion rights." [Prouty v. The Hartford Life and Accident Insurance Co. and C&S Wholesale Grocers, No. 12-cv-12097-MAP (D. Mass. Feb. 12, 2014)] (U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts)  

Decision by Committee Does Not Insulate Employer from Potential Liability for FMLA or ADA Claims
"The court rejected the employer's contention that the comparators cited by the employee as having been treated more favorably were not similarly situated because different decision-makers were involved.... The district court erred by 'insisting that the composition of the decision maker groups be precisely the same in every relevant disciplinary decision,' the Tenth Circuit found. 'We disagree because there is more than enough overlap to conclude the employees identified here were similarly situated.'" [Smothers v. Solvay Chemicals, Inc., No. 12-8013 (10th Cir. Jan. 21, 2014)] (Wolters Kluwer Law & Business)  

District Court Rules That SPD Can Be a Plan Document
"In a recent federal district court decision, the court concluded an SPD constitutes the plan document if there is no other plan document. The SPD precluded double dipping; the administrative services contract did not address the issue. The participant claimed that under Cigna v. Amara, the SPD could not be the plan document and that the plan document therefore had to be the administrative services contract. The federal district court disagreed, stating that if there is only an SPD, then the SPD is the plan document and it can be enforced." [L&W Associates Welfare Benefit Plan v. Wines, No. 12-cv-13424 (E.D. Mich. Jan. 13, 2014)] (Stinson Leonard Street)  

For Many, Few Health Plan Choices, High Premiums on Online Exchanges
"Consumers in 515 counties, spread across 15 states, have only one insurer selling coverage through the online marketplaces ... In more than 80% of those counties, the sole insurer is a local Blue Cross & Blue Shield plan. Residents of wealthier, more populated counties in the U.S. receive lower-priced choices than those living in counties with a single insurer." (The Wall Street Journal; subscription may be required)  

ACA Backers Push Skimpier 'Copper' Insurance Policies
"Many plans that offered less coverage were canceled when the health-care law was rolled out because they didn't meet its new requirements.... Now, some insurers and a pair of Senate Democrats are trying to change the law permanently so that individuals and small businesses can buy so-called copper plans. The plans likely would have lower premiums, but purchasers would pay more of their ordinary health costs upfront. Greater coverage would kick in for serious, unforeseen health episodes that would require, for example, a hospital stay." (The Wall Street Journal; subscription may be required)  

Can New Payment and Delivery System Models Achieve High-Value Care for Mental Health and Substance-Use Disorders?
"With the exception of nicotine-dependence treatment, very few quality-of-care measures related to [treatment of mental health / substance abuse disorders] have been written into ACO contracts.... [T]here are good reasons[:] ... payers must limit the number of metrics overall to ensure providers can focus on each one; there are fewer objective quality measures; and the conditions may be less prevalent in particular populations (e.g., schizophrenia among commercial plan enrollees)." (The Commonwealth Fund)  

The Ten Least Expensive Health Insurance Markets in the U.S.
"People in much of Minnesota, northwestern Pennsylvania and Tucson, Ariz., are getting the best bargains from the health care law's new insurance marketplaces: premiums half the price or less than what insurers in the country's most expensive places are charging. The 10 regions with the lowest premiums in the nation also include Salt Lake City, all of Hawaii and eastern Tennessee.... The cheapest cost regions tend to have robust competition between hospitals and doctors, allowing insurers to wangle lower rates." (Kaiser Health News)  

Obamacare 'Bailout' for One Insurer Will Cost Up to $450 Million in 2014
"Humana announced that it expects to tap the three risk adjustment mechanisms in ObamaCare for between $250 and $450 million in 2014. This amounts to about 25 percent of the insurer's expected exchange revenue. This money is needed to offset losses that the insurer will take as a result of slower enrollment in its ObamaCare plans, and a skewed risk pool that weighs more heavily toward older and less healthy members than it originally budgeted. More than half of the money will come from the $25 billion reinsurance pool that ObamaCare provides (collected through a tax on employer-sponsored health plans). The other half will come mostly from the risk corridors." (Forbes)  

One in Five Buyers of Health Insurance Under New Law Did Not Pay Premiums on Time
"[A] spokeswoman for Blue Shield of California said that 80 percent of the people who signed up for its plans had paid by the company's due date, Jan. 15.... Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, said ... that the company had 135,000 'paid members,' out of 200,000 who began to enroll through the exchanges. 'I think people are enrolling in multiple places,' Mr. Bertolini said in a conference call with securities analysts. 'They are shopping. And what happens is that they never really get back on HealthCare.gov to disenroll from plans they prior enrolled in.'" (The New York Times; subscription may be required)  

[Opinion]

Annual Report on the State of the Nation's Health Care (PDF)
"[T]he trend toward ever-narrower networks pre-dates the ACA itself, and can be found in many Medicare Advantage plans and private health insurance plans offered by large employers. Many plans also are imposing overly restrictive medication formularies that may make it difficult for patients to afford the prescriptions that work best for them. The College believes that the federal government has a special responsibility to ensure that federally-qualified health plans (QHPs), whether offered through the exchanges created by the ACA, or through Medicare Advantage, do not create undue barriers to patients getting appropriate care from physicians they trust and the medications they need." (American College of Physicians)  

[Opinion]

The Flaw of Regulatory Perfection
"The fee-for-service reimbursement bureaucracy multiplies the box-checking and skewing of sensible judgment (doctors spend 30% of their time on paperwork). Regulatory overload in health care causes various forms of failure -- unnecessary cost, grotesque inefficiency, corrosion of professional judgment, and a palpable degradation of professional spirit. Then pile on top of this the ability of any sick person to bring a lawsuit against a doctor in almost any amount, without any reliable decision maker, and -- voila -- you have the world's most expensive healthcare system, by almost a factor of two, and perhaps the most dispirited medical professionals in the developed world." (Common Good)  

For State-Funded Service Providers, New York's Limitations on Executive Compensation and Administrative Expenses Are Now in Effect (PDF)
"Since only covered providers are subject to the new limits and filing requirements, the agencies recommend -- but do not require -- using their Covered Provider Determination Worksheet to determine whether an individual/entity qualifies as a covered provider.... An individual/entity does not become a covered provider simply because it is in the same corporate family (including parent and subsidiary corporations) as a covered provider. Such an individual/entity may, however, be a covered provider if it receives a sufficient level of state funding or payments from a covered provider rather than directly from a state agency." (Buck Consultants)  

Ensuring Best Practices for Nonqualified Deferred Compensation Plans
"Plan sponsors may want to examine employer contributions and whether participants need to be kept on a strict schedule, with penalties imposed for voluntary terminations (i.e., the participant decides to leave the company). In addition, plan sponsors may want to consider whether the offering of signing bonuses or other types of compensation is the right move for them.... [It] is also important to consider what types of investments are being offered to participants." (PLANSPONSOR.com)  

High-Profile State Exchanges Considered Poor Performers in Updated State Healthcare Exchange “Report Card”
Decision Resources Group

John Hancock Retirement Plan Services Receives Top Marks from Advisors, Plan Sponsors and Industry Associations
John Hancock Retirement Plan Services

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