A big milestone for any small businesses is offering small business health insurance for the first time. Your small business is off the ground, you're looking to hire your first employee, or perhaps you need a health benefits package to retain a key employee.

In the past, businesses have always relied on group health insurance to offer employee health
benefits. However with continual renewal increases and new ObamaCare regulations, businesses of all sizes are looking at new options for offering employee health benefits. Because of these factors, many business owners are adopting a new strategy -- defined contribution health plans.

Recruiting and retaining key employees is important to every company, and your health benefit program is a key part of the compensation you offer to employees.

As we welcome the new year, ClarifyingHealth.com takes a look at the top 25 employee health benefits articles of 2012. Discover what thousands of brokers, managers, and human resource professionals were reading last year, and make sure you didn't miss out on any of 2012's biggest employee health benefits news:

Traditional employer-sponsored health insurance has been hit by soaring costs in recent years, making it less affordable for employers and employees. From 1999 to 2012, the annual premium that U.S. health insurance companies charged for employer-sponsored health benefits plans increased approximately 272 percent to approximately $15,000 per family and $5,700 per single. The average employee contribution for family coverage increased 280 percent and the average annual deductible for conventional family coverage increased 448 percent.

The following is a guest post by Dale Petersen. Dale Petersen served as the director of benefits at Darden Restaurants Inc. from 1988 until 2000 where he directed benefit and HR programs for the $5 billion Fortune 500 company with 160,000 employees in US and Canada. You can connect with Dale on linkedin.

In an environment of continual premium increases, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is forcing firms to consider alternative employee health benefits programs. A defined contribution plan, or DCP, provides specific advantages to employers under health reform.  Industry experts believe the adoption of DCPs by U.S. employers will accelerate over the next year. So, what is a DCP? Here's an overview.

Employers need a competitive health benefits program to recruit and retain top employees, but traditional employer-sponsored health insurance has become unaffordable. As a result, businesses of all shapes and sizes are considering offering “healthcare reimbursements” vs. “health insurance” rather than reducing or cutting out benefits completely.  Similar to employers’ recent shift to from “defined benefit” pension plans to “defined contribution” 401k plans in the retiree benefit space, defined contribution healthcare plans are becoming an attractive alternative to traditional “defined benefit” employer health insurance plans.

A common question we receive at Zane Benefits is "what are the minimum documentation requirements for HRA claims?" To maintain compliance, an HRA plan must adhere to the IRS rules for valid documentation.  This blog post outlines the HRA claim documentation that a compliant HRA Claims Processing Department requires for approval. To receive tax-free reimbursement from an HRA, the IRS requires an HRA participant to submit documentation showing the following specific items:

Deloitte recently released survey results that predict one in ten businesses in the US will drop health coverage for their employees over the next few years, and that even more will in the future.  Many of those businesses are expected to establish defined contribution health plans.