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A Basic Overview of Employee Benefits

Topics covered include the five main areas of employee benefits: statutory benefits, health and welfare plans, qualified retirement plans, paid time off plans, and executive benefits and perks. Mr. Kushner provides insight on how benefits evolved to where they are today, identifies current trends, and outlines how benefits today are transitioning with changes within both organizations and their employees.

Current and Future Trends in Employee Benefits

An update on employee benefit trends for this year and beyond. The session will include items affecting health care costs, other welfare plans, qualified retirement plans, and legislative and regulatory trends that will impact upon employee benefits and the HR field, now and into the future.

Three Alternative Realities for Employee Benefits in 2018:
Which One Is Yours?

How changes in the demographics of the workforce and the needs of  organizations’ and employees’  will affect  employee benefits  are addressed in this future-focused and entertaining keynote. Focusing on four factors which impact today and future benefits, Mr. Kushner synthesizes a number of trends to identify what organizations and employees need to do now in order to be prepared and successful in the  future. Mr. Kushner makes some bold predictions of three completely different alternative realities for ten years hence, and how only one will ensure both organizational and employee success in the future.

Benefits Confidential: 10 Secrets to Better, More Cost Effective Benefits

Nationally known employee benefits expert Gary Kushner, SPHR, CBP -- one of the Society for Human Resource Management’s most highly-rated annual conference speakers -- will reveal 10 insider's secrets to providing more cost-effective benefit designs which meet the needs of both the organization and its employees. In this session, Mr. Kushner will divulge proven, applicable strategies and tactics to help you expose opportunities to improve your health plan choices, prescription drug plan design, paid time off programs, qualified retirement plans, and more.

Consumer-Directed Health Plans:
A Strategy for Lowering Health Plan Utilization?

An overview of Consumer-Directed Health Plans (CDHP). CDHPs are a newer tool that proponents argue have the ability not to shift costs to plan participants, but rather to engage them as prudent consumers and thereby reduce utilization, a win-win proposition for both employers and their employees. Critics argue that these plans erode traditional employer-provided health coverages and only positively affect a small group of employees. Mr. Kushner covers CDHPs and the benefit strategies they try to address, and then delves into the details of how the plans actually operate, using real-world implementations to highlight both what works and where the "bumps in the road" seem to be. The session also covers HRAs and HSAs, tools used in conjunction with CDHPs. Finally, the session concludes with strategic design considerations for an employer who wishes to explore these plans for their workforce.

The Next Consumer-Directed Health Plan Tool:
Health Savings Accounts

An overview and update on Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), a creation of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. HSAs expand upon other forms of personal care accounts, and come with both advantages and disadvantages to employers and employees. This session will cover CDHPs and then delve into the details of HSAs: their rules, comparisons with other forms of personal care accounts, and strategic design considerations for an employer.

How to Contain Health Care Costs

An overview of factors impacting the rapidly escalating costs of providing health benefits to employees, and how employers can best address these issues. The session will include items outlining various strategies that involve both employees and the employer in making prudent health care decisions, as well as design and funding alternatives to help both employers and their employees gain greater control over their health care spending. Newer strategies dealing with flexibility and choice as well as consumer-directed health plan designs will also be discussed.

Optimizing HR Strategy for Organizational Effectiveness:
Setting the Table for Success

In most organizations today, optimizing the selection, deployment, and retention of its human capital is the paramount differentiator of organizational success or failure.  In this fast-paced and entertaining keynote program, nationally recognized human resource expert Gary Kushner, President and CEO of Kushner & Company, outlines what it takes for leaders to uncover their organization’s human capital needs, develop both proven and leading-edge strategies to optimize its workforce contributions, and the appropriate metrics to determine the effectiveness of its chosen approaches.  For non-HR organizational leaders, the program concludes with the next steps to determining if the internal HR group is functioning at its peak strategic level.  For HR leaders, the program concludes with specific steps of how to get (and keep) a “seat at the table.”