When your company decides to offer health care coverage to employees, you’re banking on the overall benefit to employee morale, retention rates, and health. While health benefits are indeed an excellent way to retain top employees and invest in their long-term health, implementing a health plan automatically requires you to follow a slew of compliance regulations.

These compliance regulations are designed to protect the interests of your plan participants and ensure you're following federal and state mandates for health plan operation.

Each year, businesses offer employees the opportunity to sign up for, reevaluate, change, cancel, or otherwise adjust their healthcare plan during the open enrollment period. This timeframe also applies to individuals who participate in government-based Marketplace health plans on some level, which has an enrollment deadline in mid-August.

Generally, employees are not able to engage in any insurance-related activity outside the open enrollment timeframe. However, there are some exceptions to the rule.

To help employees interested in changing health insurance outside of open enrollment, keep reading.

The efforts to recognize mental health issues as critical as physical issues have gone on for several decades. Finally, in 1996, the Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA) was enacted to prohibit large group health plans from imposing limits on mental health benefits, especially when less than favorable limits were imposed on surgical or medical benefits.

When companies start to approach the big 5-0 in terms of staffing, Human Resource (HR) teams face new levels of intensity when it comes to legal matters. It’s far easier to maintain a one-on-one approach to employee relations and compliance with smaller numbers. However, once your business reaches the level of success where you need more people to drive that momentum, you incur more risk.

More than a year since the start of the pandemic, we are continuing to monitor the ripple effects on business operations worldwide. As one of the most highly visible – and scrutinized – sectors of the economy, the health insurance sector was forced to grapple with an extraordinary crisis. Although insurance analysts will be studying the influence of COVID-19 for years to come – and some of the pandemic’s effects have yet to be determined – here’s what we know about the impact of COVID-19 on the insurance market so far.

Although some organizations stay on top of HR audits, others appreciate their importance but fail to perform them. Organizations can fall short on conducting them due to a lack of time, resources, and HR expertise. Without these periodic, objective reviews of HR practices, policies, alignment with company culture, and strategic direction, the organization will suffer in the long run.

Regardless of the reason why you need it, purchasing insurance can cause feelings of anxiety and dread. Buying the right type and level of coverage for you and your business requires a lot of time and resources. You want to ensure that you’re purchasing the right coverage to mitigate risks and provide financial security. If you’re looking for employee benefits, you also have the challenge of balancing the needs and requests of your employees with the needs and budget of the business.

Securing insurance takes time and resources. Because each individual, family, and business has a unique set of risks, there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” policy, regardless of the type of policy you’re seeking. Insurance brokers provide the expertise required to help individuals and businesses secure insurance policies to meet a wide array of needs.

Insurance brokers and agents act as intermediaries between insurance companies selling insurance and consumers seeking to purchase insurance. There are several insurance options and insurance organizations from which to choose. Brokers and agents help navigate the many choices of insurance available to meet the needs of their clients at a fair price. If you’re in the market for personal or business insurance, you might be wondering what the differences are between an insurance agent and an insurance broker.  

Health insurance is one of the top benefits that employers can offer to employees. Providing health insurance to employees requires employers to stay on top of the ever-changing legal landscape focused on employer benefits. Do you know both the current and new federal and California health insurance regulations for 2020? In the content below, we explore how this year's health insurance regulations impact employers and employees.