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Webinar Guidance on Effective Open Enrollment Communications
Open Enrollment, the fourth-quarter period when employees enroll in employer-sponsored group benefit programs, is “crunch time” for human resource managers and their staff. At a time when HR professionals’ plates are full of end-of-...
Legal Alert: IRS Issues Affordability Percentage Adjustment for 2024
This alert is of interest to all applicable large employers (ALEs) – generally, those with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released Rev. Proc. 2023-29, which contains the inflation adj...
Legal Alert: IRS Adjusts Health Flexible Spending Account and Other Benefit Limits for 2024
On November 9, 2023, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released Revenue Procedure 2023-34, which increases the health flexible spending account (FSA) salary reduction contribution limit to $3,200 for plan years beginning in 2024, an i...
Legal Alert: HIPAA Privacy Rules Amended to Require Protection of Reproductive Healthcare Information
On April 26, 2024, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) issued a Final Rule amending the HIPAA Privacy Rule to protect the ability of individuals to receive reproductive h...
Legal Alert: PCORI Fees Due By July 31, 2023
Employers that sponsor self-insured group health plans, including health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) should keep in mind the upcoming July 31, 2023 deadline for paying fees that fund the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) via&...
Legal Alert: IRS Releases PCORI Fee For Plan Years Ending Before October 1, 2024
This alert is of interest to all employers that sponsor self-insured group health plans, including Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs). Note that the PCORI fee does not apply to most health FSAs. The IRS has released Notice 2023-70, whic...
The importance of women’s health concerns in employee benefits design
Women’s Health Month 2024 coincides with jarring controversy and growing concern over challenges and inequities regarding women’s health in general and one area in particular: maternal health. Maternal health will be among...
Legal Alert: Agencies Provide Updated County Data for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services and Guidance
On November 28, 2023, the Department of Labor (DOL), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Health and Human Services (HHS), collectively known as the Tri-Agencies, issued Part 63 of their FAQ series regarding implementation of the Affordable C...
This Mental Health Awareness Month, ‘Run Your Own Race’
On the eve of the 2024 Boston Marathon in mid-April, a reporter for one of Boston’s NPR stations shared a theme she’d seized on while covering the previous year’s event: “Run your own race.” Approaching May and Mental He...
A Cautionary Tale: Self-Funded Plan Administrators Must Meaningfully and Effectively Communicate With Plan Participants and Their Providers on Appeal
Sponsors of self-funded ERISA plans have fiduciary obligations to plan participants, which includes the obligation to provide a full and fair review of claims and effectively and meaningfully communicate or engage with plan participants regarding cla...
Q1 Considerations: Affordability for Applicable Large Employers
Under the ACA, Applicable Large Employers (ALEs) are required to offer “affordable” medical coverage to full-time employees or be subject to a fine. In September 2023, the IRS announced that the 2024 affordability percentage would reduce...
Employers, Employees and Job-Flexibility Tradeoffs
Faced with one of contemporary business’s most prominent dilemmas – allow work from home or insist on return to work? – employers and employees alike must come to terms with an axiom: Life is a series of tradeoffs. With this not...
Three Key Considerations for Large Employers
Early in the year is the time for employers who are approaching or over 50 employees to document and update the “key components” of being a larger employer, to ensure that no compliance obligation is missed. The world of human resources i...
Legal Alert: CMS Redesigns the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Program Beginning in 2025
CMS Redesigns the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Program Beginning in 2025 As a result of the changes to Medicare Part D under §11201 of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, on April 1, 2024, CMS released Final Redesign Program Instru...
Webinar: Weight-Loss Drugs and Group Health Plans | Alera Group
Is your organization funding GLP-1 drugs and other specialty medications as part of your group health insurance plan? Are you personally paying for a GLP-1 used as weight-loss medication? If your answer to either or both of these questions is yes, yo...
Show Why Your Voluntary Benefit Offerings Make You an Employer of Choice
Many employers supplement their core employee benefits with voluntary benefit offerings, but do they do a good enough job of communicating those benefits’ availability and value? If you’re a business owner or benefits manager asking that...
Legal Alert: RxDC Reporting Due June 1
Reminder: RxDC Reporting Due June 1 With the 2023 reference year RxDC reporting deadline approaching soon, plan sponsors should familiarize themselves with recent updates to the RxDC Reporting Instructions. As a reminder, the...
Open Enrollment: Employee Spending Account Education
It's peak open enrollment season at Lumity, and I wanted to share one of my favorite PowerPoint presentations. It's an employee education deck around spending accounts. During open enrollment, employees look to HR for benefits electi...
Health Savings Accounts 101 Slideshow
Open enrollment season is upon us! For employers that offer an HSA-eligible plan, we've put together a slideshow you can use to educate your employees about Health Savings Accounts. Our #1 tip? It's helpful to exp...
5 Tips and Templates for Open Enrollment
Once a year, your employees are asked to make a complicated decision—one that could significantly affect their health and finances. And employees are looking to HR for guidance as they make their health plan choices. So, today, I don’t...
10 Things Your Employees Need to Know about Health Plans
Not understanding the basics of how a plan works can significantly drive up healthcare costs for your employees. If you or a loved one has faced unexpected medical bills, you’ve felt the stress and limbic system response. There are a ton of...
Asynchronous Open Enrollment Experience for Remote Employees
Back in March 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, the Lumity team began planning to deliver a 100% virtual open enrollment to our clients with remote employees in mind. Asynchronous Approach Employers expressed a need for more flexibi...
6 Ways to Improve Open Enrollment
We may be in the 20th year of the “new” millennium, but employee benefits has been left behind in the 20th century. Despite HR tech innovations, the quality of customer service remains lower than almost every other industry. This year, co...
Employers, Domestic Partnerships, and the IRS
Tax and Coverage Rules When it comes to health benefits for domestic partners, employers often struggle with the tax and coverage rules. Multiple factors compound the complexity, so if you’re not an expert, it’s easy to spin in circles...
HDHPs have an Ugly Branding Problem
Traditional PPO plans saddle both employers and their employees with high monthly premiums. For this reason, many employers offer High-Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs) with lower premium costs—and then offer Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to hel...
How to Drive HSA Adoption: Educate Employees
In our previous post about driving Health Savings Account (HSA) adoption, we covered how to mitigate employee risk with your health plan design. In this final post in our series, we’ll focus on employee HSA education. HSA survey respondent...
How to Choose Between An HMO and a High-Deductible Health Plan
So many acronyms! It's easy to get lost in the land of healthcare plan options. For this post, we'll tackle a frequent question: what's the difference between a health maintenance organization (HMO) plan and a high-deductible health plan...
Out-of-Network Care: What You Need to Know About It
“Care” is defined as physicians and dentists, but also specialists like anesthesiologists, occupational therapists, and physical therapists. The services provided by hospitals, labs, radiology facilities, and pharmacies are also deemed ca...
Domestic partnerships, civil unions, and health insurance: the basics
Health benefits for parties in a domestic partnership or civil union can be an effective recruiting tool. Domestic partnerships and civil unions historically provided coverage to same-sex couples. Yet health benefits for such parties can cost a compa...
Qualifying Event Documentation
When a significant even happens in your life, you may be able to make changes to your employer-sponsored health insurance to add or drop coverage for you or dependents. When this happens, the insurance company requires certain documentation to confir...
Workplace Wellness: Workplace Ergonomics & the Prevention of Injury
30Workplace Wellness: The importance of Workplace Ergonomics in the Prevention of Injury Implementing workplace wellness programs can be a significant task. However, as covered in the latest posts in this series, the benefits of a healthy wo...
Bringing Open Enrollment into the 21st century
One thing that is sure to have employers and employees singing the same tune is a mutual disdain for the open enrollment period. It's a confusing process for workers and a laborious task for even the most efficient companies. If you're o...
Workplace Wellness: Preventing Substance Abuse
Substance abuse is the unhealthy use of alcohol, drugs or other substances that negatively interfere with a person’s functioning or well-being. People abuse substances such as drugs, alcohol, and tobacco for varied and complicated reasons....
Workplace Wellness: Managing and Alleviating Stress in the Workplace
Stress in the workplace is a serious issue. Many of us exist in a culture where the line between work and life is becoming increasingly blurred. Often, stresses from the day spill into the evening until all our pressures compound into a s...
Open Enrollment Education: Be Proactive
Every year that short window of time opens up when employees are allowed to revisit their benefits. Open enrollment can be an extremely stressful and overwhelming time for everyone involved since it's typically the only time during the year ...
Workplace Wellness: Combat Fatigue in the Workplace
We have all been there on a Monday morning. Feverishly hitting snooze on the alarm as it rudely awakens us from a blissful sleep. Going through our morning routine in autopilot until we find ourselves at a work station rubbing the sleep from our eyes...
Workplace Wellness: Exercise Initiatives
One of the best ways to improve the overall health and well-being of your employees is to introduce different opportunities to exercise into the workplace. As covered in the last blog, regular exercise provides many benefits including health improvem...
Spotlight Series: Year-End Health Savings Account Eligibility And Tax Season
Yes, it's the end of the year and tax season seems far away, but as many may have switched to an HSA-qualified HDHP during open enrollment, it's important to know how year end eligibility in 2015 could affect your taxes in April of 2016 and b...
Spotlight Series: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Health Savings Accounts
Having already beaten the drum of HSAs in a previous post, it’s also prudent to identify the negative aspects that can be associated with the use of these accounts. After you’ve decided that an HSA-qualifying HDHP is for you and you&rsquo...
Spotlight Series: Health Savings Accounts and the Inherent Gamble of Health Insurance
Insurance as an industry calculates probabilities of pooled risk. Insurance companies are betting that we (as individuals and on a larger scale, employment groups) will pay more in premiums than they will in medical care costs. As they make this bet,...
Spotlight Series: A Health Savings Account Rundown
We at Lumity tend to hail the existence and use of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) more often than not, partially because our customers tend to have younger, relatively healthy individuals and families in their group that benefit from the selection of...
A Glossary of Health Care Terms
Claim A formal request to an insurance company asking for a payment based on the terms of a certain health insurance policy – usually made by the healthcare provider based on services you use. Co-insurance A percentage of co...
Spotlight Series: The Employer Mandate 2015
Compliance with the employer mandate in the ACA isn’t hard with the right reporting system and technology. In this post, we’ll shine a light on what you need to know and do to comply. When you're done, get in touch with us and see how...
Lumity Receives $14M in Series A Led By The Social+Capital Partnership
Big things are happening here at Lumity. Our core belief, that people should be able to easily access the information they need to make the right health insurance decisions no matter the size of their employer, drives us. Today we are happ...
