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Employers who sponsor self-funded group health plans (as well as fully-insured employers who want to proactively comply with non-discrimination requirements) and are moving from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) funding arrangements need to decide and define how they allocate funds for employees to use. DC funding arrangements allow an employer to completely define their maximum annual spend for health benefits prior to open enrollment.

We occasionally get questions from brokers and employers about how they should setup their defined contribution funding arrangements. In a future post we'll share some of the general guidance that brokers can share with their clients. However, in this post we'll take a more technical approach, looking first at the regulations that apply to employers moving to a full defined contribution funding arrangement.

One of the recurring themes at the Consumer-Driven Healthcare and the Private Marketplace Conference in Scottsdale, AZ last week was the idea that a private exchange should be thought of as a “front door” to the healthcare system, rather than a finite destination. What does that really mean?

A Basic Explanation For the 52 million Americans who care for a spouse, child, or parent, health insurance can help pay the medical bills and provide some day-to-day support. Though

A Basic Explanation If you qualify, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) can help you afford insurance by paying part of your healthcare costs.With a cost-sharing reduction, the government will help

A Basic Explanation Coinsurance (or co-insurance) simply refers to the percentage you pay when you and your insurer split the cost of some types of healthcare services -- for example,

A Basic Explanation If you go to your doctor because your stomach has been hurting for a while, it’s unlikely he’ll just guess at what’s ailing you. After a physical

The key to making a private exchange work on an ongoing basis after launch is communication. While this statement may seem obvious, in my experience in an account management role with Array's clients, I have found the need to continuously reiterate the importance of communication.

We at Array Health are deeply interested in file standardization. While we've got a lot of experience interfacing with our clients using their proprietary file formats, standardization across the industry makes life easier for everyone. If health insurance had its own version of pain remediation, it might just be file standardization.

When people think of a private health insurance exchange, they generally think of the marketplace itself, but there’s a lot of work that goes into the backend, including enrollment files, member maintenance files, billing data, plan data, and rating data. We’ve been managing and maintaining integrations with carriers’ enterprise systems since 2006, but in this blog post we’ll focus on one of the most notorious file formats for enrollment and why it’s here to stay.