This post is from Market Watch. “Open Enrollment, the opportunity to review insurance and accounts benefits coverage for the upcoming calendar year, is here. For many, the ever-increasing choices can make the evaluation process complex and difficult. However, Andy Smith, Senior Partner with Cornerstone Financial Partners, believes that by not investing the time to make informed choices, workers may be leaving money on the table and putting their future at risk.

To help simplify the decisions at hand, Smith suggests starting with five basic questions.” Click here to read the rest of this article.

This article comes from All Business.com and is written by Keith Girard.

“Who should get health insurance, how should they get it, and who pays? Those three questions are at the forefront of the current controversy over health care and will provide the framework for the great debate that will begin once the presidential primaries end and the general election begins.

Small business owners, of course, have a huge stake in the outcome of both the election and the debate. Of the 47 million people currently without health insurance, the overwhelming majority either own or are employed by a small business. That means health care should be one of the key decision points for choosing the next president. So where do the presidential candidates stand and what does the public think?” Click here to read the rest of this article which includes the positions of the Presidential candidates.

This post comes from the L.A. Times. U.S. manufacturers who provide health insurance spend an average of $2.38 per worker per hour on healthcare — more than twice as much as their foreign competitors, an analysis released Tuesday found.

The study provides support for the now-familiar lament of employers — that rising healthcare costs are eating into the corporate bottom line.

American automakers say employee health coverage adds $1,500 to the price of each car, and many U.S. manufacturers have blamed rising healthcare costs for decisions to drop health benefits for workers or shift jobs overseas.

But many economists have pooh-poohed the idea that U.S. businesses are hurt by their comparatively high healthcare costs. Instead, they have suggested that companies would pass those costs onto workers by lowering wages or onto consumers by raising prices. Click here to read the rest of this article.

This article comes from Fox Business News. United Benefit Advisors LLC one of the nation’s leading employee benefits advisory organizations, today announced key findings from its 2008 UBA Employer Opinion Survey, which delineates employers’ specific health care strategies, health benefits philosophy and opinion, health plan management, and Consumer Driven Health Care.The release of the 2008 UBA Employer Opinion Survey contains representative responses from employers by both region and employer size. Of the 1,664 employers polled, 72.5% have or want to have a wellness program that utilizes a health risk assessment; and 59.2% have or desire to implement a chronic disease management program. The survey also found that employers with 200 or more employees were 54% more likely to describe themselves as “leading edge” or “fairly quick” to adopt wellness programs. Firms with more than 1,000 employees produced results that indicated they were two-and-a-half times as likely to describe themselves as “leading edge” or “fairly quick” concerning disease management program adoption.

“The tide has clearly turned in that the majority of employers believe in the long-term value and positive impact that comprehensive wellness and disease management programs provide,” said William Stafford, Vice President, Member Services for UBA. “Keeping the healthy employees healthy while stabilizing and/or improving the health of employees with chronic conditions will dramatically improve everyone’s health and quality of life.” Click here to read the rest of the survey results and article.

This article comes from Inc.com.

Despite rising health insurance costs in recent years, most small businesses continue to offer the same level of employee benefits, a new study shows.

Between 2000 and 2005, employee insurance costs rose by 30 percent for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, according to a joint report by the Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City, Mo.-based entrepreneurship advocacy group, and the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica-Calif.-based research group. Because businesses of this size tend to require participation in insurance plans, they were most affected by higher insurance prices, researchers said.

Yet, over the same five-year period, the number of small businesses offering benefits remained steady, dropping by less than 1.5 percent, the study found.

“Perhaps these small businesses — and ultimately, their employees — were willing to accept the burden of rising health insurance costs, even if it meant giving up wage increases,” Christine Eibner, an associate economist at RAND, said in a statement. “What we don’t know is whether small companies and their employees will continue to make this tradeoff,” she added.

The study, which was based on a survey of more than 2,500 businesses nationwide, also found that smaller businesses were slightly less likely to offer dental or drug coverage than larger firms, and often had higher deductibles.