Health Care Reform

As the competitive landscape for benefits brokers gets tougher, effectively communicating benefits strategies with clientsand helping them better communicate those strategies with their employees becomes even more critical.

Between the latest commission regulations and uncertain employer attitudes, brokers are looking at a new health insurance landscape, and many are wondering if there's still a place for them in the market.

A number theorist might not even understand all the figures being thrown out from every consulting firm these days. Depending on whos telling you, health reform will be responsible for employers dropping health coverage in record numbers, thus forcing employees to leave their cushy plans; it will be responsible for...

So lets bring up health care again: No matter how you look at it, some employers are dropping employee coverage, or they plan to, or fear its going to happen. And everyone involved is fearing it, too. But was reform legislation really the tipping point, or is itand always has...

Ten years ago, benefits self-funding and the stop-loss coverage that typically accompanies it was a world occupied mainly by large employers.

What these analysts ignore, however, are other factors that would significantly increase the true costs of terminating coverage. For instance, an employer would have to increase wages to make up for revoking coverage or risk losing some of its most valuable employees. The tax consequences of this wage increase and...

Health insurance plans must cover birth control as preventive care for women, with no copays, the Obama administration said Monday in a decision with far-reaching implications for health care as well as social mores.

The debtpocalypse is nigh. But, hey, at least we’re going to have NFL football.