Health risk reduction programs in employer-sponsored health plans: Part II-law and ethics.

Systematic review of employer-sponsored wellness strategies and their economic and health-related outcomes.

This review determines the characteristics and health-related and economic outcomes of employer-sponsored wellness programs and identifies possible reasons for their success. PubMed, ABI/Inform, and Business Source Premier databases, and Corporate Wellness Magazine were searched. English-language articles published from 2005 to 2011 that reported characteristics of employer-sponsored wellness p...

Employer sponsored health benefit plans under ERISA after Pegram v. Herdrich: the fiduciary duty argument and mixed eligibility versus treatment decisions.

The law, policy, and ethics of employers' use of financial incentives to improve health.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) turns to a nontraditional mechanism to improve public health: employer-provided financial incentives for healthy behaviors. Critics raise questions about incentive programs' effectiveness, employer involvement, and potential discrimination. We support incentive program development despite these concerns. The ACA sets the stage for a broad-bas...

The Effect of an Employer Health Insurance Mandate on Health Insurance Coverage and the Demand for Labor: Evidence from Hawaii

Long before passage of the federal health care reform act in 2010, which eventually will impose an individual mandate to obtain health insurance, policy makers had considered the alternative approach of employer health insurance mandates as a strategy for expanding coverage. At the Federal level, the failed health care reform plans proposed by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s and the...

The evolution of Japanese employer-sponsored retirement plans.

This article examines the development of Japanese voluntary employer-sponsored retirement plans with an emphasis on recent trends. Until 2001, companies in Japan offered retirement benefits as lump-sum severance payments and/or benefits from one of two types of defined benefit (DB) pension plans. One type of DB plan was based on the occupational pension model used in the United States before th...