Category: Benefits and Compensation

This topic provides guidance on how to handle compensation issues in a way that attracts and retains the best talent and advances the strategic goals of your business. You get news and tips on what’s going on nationally and in the states, and updates on changes in regulations, possible governmental action, and emerging compensation trends.

Health Care Reform Mandates: Impending Dates

The next three months are crunch time. Employers have to get moving on several deadlines, most of them required under health care reform. Some reform rules should have taken effect in 2014, but were subject to the year-long delay instituted by the Obama administration. Health Plan Identifiers Nov. 5, 2014 is the deadline for large group […]

Will City Slickers Give You Your Next Big Idea?

Among my favorite movies is the 1991 film City Slickers. Billy Crystal plays radio ad salesman Mitch Robbins, who is having a bit of a midlife crisis. Mitch and his two best friends decide to leave New York City to spend 2 weeks on a cattle drive in the Southwest. It’s there that Mitch meets […]

Few Self-Insured Plans Will Escape Paying Reinsurance Fees

Only self-insured plans that completely self-administer claims payments and plan operations will avoid paying onerous transitional reinsurance fees. If a self-insured health plan does no more than determine eligibility, it will have to pay, according to Jeffrey Endick, an attorney with Slevin & Hart in Washington D.C. An exception exists to the onerous fee $63 per-member-per-year fee: Self-insured […]

Tech Taking Over? HRIS Trends

Most every company is looking at the HRIS. What should your system be doing? For some guidance on this trend, we turned to BLR’s recently published HR Playbook: HR’s Gameplan for the Future.

Plan Controls Respond to PBM Spreads, Generic Cost Spikes

If a pharmacy benefits manager promises a group health plan that there will be no administrative fee for drugs, it actually could be a red flag and not a cause for celebration. It could mean the PBM is “gaming the spread” or not passing rebates through to the plan. Plans can prevent this kind of […]