MANTOOTH: Companies bogged down by employees’ poor health
The problem is, too many people make unhealthy choices and the consequences of these choices become everyone’s problem.
The problem is, too many people make unhealthy choices and the consequences of these choices become everyone’s problem.
A look at some major legislation considered this year by the Indiana General Assembly.
Susan Rider is an employee-benefits account manager at Indianapolis-based Gregory & Appel Insurance. On July 1, she will become president of the Indiana State Association of Health Underwriters. She spoke about the first-year impact of the 2010 health reform law and further changes to come.
In the face of new health reform restrictions, expect more small employers to opt for self-funded health benefits, concludes a report this week from Indianapolis-based United Benefit Advisors.
Human resources used to be about payroll and benefits. Now it’s also about watching Congress.
Health insurance brokers, who match up employers with health insurance policies, are about to have a brighter light shone on the commissions they earn from insurers. The likely result: Commissions will fall or flatline and, eventually, fall away in favor of fee-based business models.
Clarian Health got few takers in its first year offering a health care benefits program to large employers, but the Indianapolis-based hospital system is undeterred in growing its budding insurance services business.
Widely hailed provision of health care reform now raises host of questions.
Health reform entrepreneurship could brand Indiana as productive, healthy place for employers to operate.
Federal health reform will trump an Indiana law that allows health insurers to offer steep discounts to employers with healthy workers and which institute aggressive wellness programs, but experts say other provisions will motivate small firms.
In Utah, employers can give each of their workers a specific amount of money to apply toward health insurance. The worker then can use that money to choose from the 66 plans in the health insurance exchange.
Jim Hamilton, an employee-benefits lawyer at Bose McKinney & Evans in Indianapolis, discussed the likelihood of a Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives changing or even outright repealing the health care reform law, formally known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
After losing a key grant, Indianapolis Urban League laid off employees and failed to make three months' worth of retirement payments into one former worker's account—something that was remedied after the worker complained to the Labor Department.
Indiana University will no longer ask employees to fill out an online health risk assessment after more than 550 people—many anonymous—attached names to an online petition that said the plan would cause “widespread anger and disillusionment.”
A new estimate has lowered the expected cost of the federal health care overhaul to Indiana’s state government to perhaps $2.6 billion over the next decade.
In this new age of health care, ushered in by President Obama’s signing in March of a sweeping health care reform law, health care players are encouraged to remove the gloves if they want to reap the benefits of reform.
Health clinics based in employers’ offices are showing signs of breaking out of their niche among blue collar and government employers—factories, warehouses and school corporations—and could pop up in Class A office buildings filled with white collar workers.
Nearly four months after President Barack Obama signed a health reform bill into law, businesses are still grappling with its
impact on the health benefits they offer their employees.
FedEx Corp. won partial dismissal of a class-action lawsuit brought by contract drivers who contend they are entitled to full
benefits because the company treats them as employees.
Joe Guzman is a co-founder of Indianapolis-based Ascend USA, the new trade adopted after Guzman merged his
benefits brokerage, Benefits Strategies Inc., with benefits business Steven Goodin. The eight-person firm expects to hire
as many 15 new employees in the next year. Those workers will help Ascend diversify from health benefits into brokering commercial
insurance products.