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The Spencer’s Benefits Reports is a summary of the week's news items posted in the WHAT'S NEW pages of Spencer’s Benefits Reports Online. For questions regarding this email service, contact Customer Service at (800)449-9525.
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Prevention and wellness are among the key benefits priorities, along with reducing the cost of benefits and value-based benefits design, for employers responding to the Midwest Business Group on Health’s (MBGH) 2008 Readiness to Change Survey. The survey, distributed in March and April through more than 60 business coalitions, received responses from 114 employers across varied industries, nearly three-fourths (72%) of which had more than 1,000 employees. One-third of the responding employers were in manufacturing and most were based in the East and Midwest regions…
In interim final regulations published in the May 6 Federal Register, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provided implementation guidelines for provisions of the Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP Extension Act of 2007 relating to Medicare payment for long term care hospitals. These provisions include a three-year delay in the application of certain payment adjustments for short-stay outliers and revisions to the reporting year 2008 standard federal rate…
The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) is the first-place winner of the General Services Administration’s annual citizen service award in recognition of the agency’s exceptional customer service to the American public. The award was announced recently during the Interagency Resources Management Conference…
Total retirement plan assets in the United States continued to grow from $16.5 trillion at the end of 2006 to $17.8 trillion at the end of the third quarter of 2007, according to statistics reported by the Investment Company Institute (ICI) in its April Fundamentals newsletter. Defined benefit plan assets grew from $2.414 trillion at the beginning of 2007 to $2.482 trillion at the end of the third quarter of 2007, while defined contribution plan assets grew from $4.119 trillion to $4.504 trillion over the same time period…
The Internal Revenue Service has scheduled a public hearing for June 6 on the agency’s proposed regulations governing cash balance plans and other hybrid retirement plans. Notice of the hearing was published in the May 2 Federal Register…
Implementation of the four cornerstones for health care reform instigated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) two years ago is continuing, but there still is a long way to go, reported HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt at the Midwest Business Group on Health’s (MBGH) annual conference in Chicago on May 1…
In Announcement 2008-44, the Internal Revenue Service states that individuals who have payments made by direct deposit under the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-185) to their individual retirement accounts or certain other accounts that are afforded special tax benefits under the Internal Revenue Code may remove the payments without incurring any adverse tax consequences…
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation has appointed Rebecca Anne Batts as the agency’s inspector general. Ms. Batts comes to the PBGC from the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), where she most recently served as assistant inspector general for highway and transit. She joined the Transportation Department in 2006 as a deputy assistant inspector general, responsible for all audits of the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, the Maritime Administration, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, and the St. Lawrence Seaway…
Americans with employer-provided health insurance have seen their premiums increase ten times faster than their income in the past few years, according to a study released on April 29 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data from 2001 to 2005, conducted by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota, showed that an increasing proportion of workers’ incomes is going to pay for the rising cost of health care. The report was released during the annual national Cover the Uninsured Week (April 27 through May 3), a nonpartisan campaign that the Foundation organized to advocate for health care coverage for all Americans…
The number of Americans enrolled in health savings account (HSA)-compatible high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) rose to 6.1 million as of January 2008, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). The report, January 2008 Census Shows 6.1 Million People Covered by HSA/High-Deductible Health Plans, indicated that this is a 35% increase from last year, when AHIP reported that 4.5 million were enrolled in such plans. However, AHIP has data from only 800,000 actual HSAs, which means that of the 6.1 million enrolled in an HDHP, not all of them are enrolled in the HSA component of the plan…
In a recent report to Congress on health savings account (HSA) participation rates, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated that tax returns indicate HSA account holders reported higher incomes than other tax filers…
The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) has announced that it will host a free Webcast on May 8 to help employers and plan administrators understand and comply with the Form 5500 annual report series reporting requirements under ERISA…
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued proposed regulations that would revise the Medicare hospital inpatient prospective payment systems (PPS) for operating and capital-related costs for discharges occurring in fiscal year 2009. The regulations, which appeared in the April 30 Federal Register, implement changes arising from the CMS’s continuing experience with those systems, and also would implement certain provisions made by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act included in the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, and the TMA, Abstinence Education, and QI Programs Extension Act of 2007…
Benefits costs rose by 0.6% and compensation increased 0.8% for the period from December 2007 to March 2008, according to the most recent Employment Cost Index from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In the last quarter’s BLS statistics, benefits costs rose at a slightly quicker pace than salaries…
On May 1, by a vote of 414-1, the House passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA, H.R. 493), which the Senate approved on April 24…
The Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) has issued corrective amendments to its final regulations regarding qualified default investment alternatives (QDIAs) under participant directed individual account plans (such as 401(k) plans); as well as Field Assistance Bulletin (FAB) 2008-03, which provides additional guidance. The corrective amendments were published in the April 30 Federal Register…
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