Benefits of health savings accounts

 The health savings accounts (HSA for short) have generated much excitement recently and rightly so. With rising health insurance, many companies are cutting costs by offering the alternative that has a high deductible for employees. Source Image : www.letusinsureyou.com HSAs are mainly used to help pay medical expenses with tax-free money, but can only be set if you have a health plan with a... Read More »

Anthem Hacking - Perspective

In comments to one of our previous posts on this topic, Co-Blogger Bob makes a terrific point:"Not taking anything away from Mandiant as they are the "A team" when it comes to tracking down hackers ... Most companies do very little when it comes to cybersecurity and many (mo st?) have probably been hacked and just don't know it."This morning, the Wall Street Journal... Read More »

Friday LinkFest

So, several items that, while blogworthy, don't seem to merit their own dedicated post:■ As we've already seen, the future of health care CO-OPs is, at best, rocky. At the Employee Benefit Advisor, Bruce Shutan looks under the hood, and notes that "it captured nearly a quarter of the total enrollment for all 23 consumer-operated and oriented plans known as CO-OPs operating in 24... Read More »

Obamacare Enrollment Update

The folks that brought us Obamacare and a non-working website like to keep those who are interested up to date on the latest score. The latest installment for week 10 of the Obamacare open enrollment saga goes like this.Since Open Enrollment began on November 15, almost 7.3 million consumers selected a plan or were automatically re-enrolled through the HealthCare.gov platform, which includes the Federally... Read More »

Anthem Hacked [UPDATED]

Picking up on where Bob left off ...As you've no doubt already heard, hackers were able to gain access to Anthem's systems, and access the personal information of both clients and employees (it's not clear whether "employees" include independent agents/brokers who represent the carrier). All told, it appears that over 80 million folks were affected.To its credit, Anthem sent out an email last night... Read More »

Blue Attack

Anthem Blue Cross policyholder data hacked. Possible 37 million affected.The information accessed during the "very sophisticated attack" did include names, birthdays, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, including income data, the company said. - Yahoo News... Read More »

Taxes, Shmaxes

Thanks to Moe Lane, we have this little gem:"Consumers who received too much in federal tax credits ... got a reprieve of sorts from the Internal Revenue Service this week. Although they still have to repay ... excess subsidies, the IRS won’t ding them with a late payment penalty if they don’t repay it by the April 15 tax deadline."Which is nice for them,... Read More »