CNBC recently featured a story about Walmart and their history of not only suggesting that employees visit Centers of Excellence for surgeries and second opinions but flying them all expenses paid. The case study revealed that between 2015 and 2018, more than half of their employees suffering from spine pain were able to avoid surgery [...]
On June 13, 2019, The Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury issued the final rule expanding health reimbursement accounts (HRAs) which allows employers greater flexibility in the breadth and scope of HRAs available for their employees. Background: Since 2013, regulations have prohibited employers from paying for an employee’s individual health insurance policy [...]
Experience shows that worksite wellness is a big part of every high-quality health plan. We take exception with a recent JAMA study that said wellness simply isn’t working. While we could point out many reasons why their assessment is short-sighted, our main objection is that their viewpoint was based on the assumption that all wellness [...]
The Massachusetts Paid Family and Medical Leave law (effective in 2021) requires employers to start making financial contributions to support the paid leave program starting on July 1, 2019. The law allows employers to deduct a part of the required contribution from each employee’s wages (along with an employer contribution*) to fund the program. The initial contributions [...]
Pre-Tax Transportation Fringe Benefits: On March 1, 2019, New Jersey becomes the first state to require employers to offer pre-tax transportation benefits to employees. A pre-tax transportation fringe benefit is a benefit that allows an employee to set aside wages on a pre-tax basis, which is then only made available to the employee for the [...]
The Internal Revenue Service released its 2020 Health Savings Account Inflation Adjustment Limits. A comparison of the 2019 and 2020 limits are listed below. The ACA maximum out-of-pocket limits have also been adjusted. The ACA uses a different adjustment calculation than the IRS when setting HSA limits year over year.
With student loan debt topping the list of concerns for so many young workers, more and more employers are looking for ways to help. While several large employers are doing things to help them reduce principal and save on interest, one large employer is allowing employees to trade up to 5 vacation days for a [...]
The College of Sports Medicine, in ranking fitness trends for 2019, concluded that millennials enjoy being part of a community that will cheer them on when they do a good job and perhaps push them a bit harder when they don’t. Other popular fitness trends include wearable technology, high intensity interval training (HIIT), yoga and [...]
For 2019, the annual fee to fund the federal Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), paid by employers that sponsor self-insured health plans and by commercial group health insurance providers, will go up by about .06 cents per employee or dependent enrolled in the health plan. The fees are due by July 31. The chart below [...]
Researchers hope the study will give private payors a better grasp of what health care costs are, and allow them to compare prices within a state and across states. (Photo: Shutterstock) This article was published on May 13, 2019 on BenefitsPro written by Scott Wooldridge. Prices range from 150 percent of Medicare prices [...]
