Tips to make HSAs even better, workers report widespread benefits satisfaction, and exchange enrollment nightmare has happy ending for Florida woman: 3 things you need to know this week in employee be

Happy new year! All of us at Benz Communications hope you had a joyful and healthy holiday season, and are ready to hit the ground running in 2014! To help jumpstart your industry reading, here’s this week’s news dash:

5 ways to make HSAs more successful

Health accounts grow up so fast, don’t they? Seems like just yesterday, health savings accounts were toddling onto the market—last month, HSAs turned 10!

Signed into law in December 2003, HSAs now serve 15.5 million Americans covered by high-deductible health plans. Our friend Dennis Triplett, CEO of UMB Healthcare Services, recently shared via BenefitsPro five tips for making HSAs more successful for you and your employees in the new year. Among them are ensuring you use meaningful analytics, and—of course—communicating year-round.

Most workers happy with their benefits

Here’s good news to start the new year with: Most employees are happy with their current health benefits.

New survey numbers from the Employee Benefits Research Institute show that 12% of employees are “extremely satisfied” with the health benefits, 39% are “very satisfied” and 37% are “somewhat satisfied.” In addition, 12% would trade wages to get more benefits.

Although most employees are confident their employer has picked the best available plan for them (82%), they also tell EBRI that they want more health plan choice: 45% say they’d prefer to choose their own insurance coverage and 21% want their employer to give them money to purchase coverage as they please. Consumers are honest about their plan-picking abilities, however; just 11% are extremely confident that they could pick the best plan for them on their own if their employer stopped offering health coverage.

This week’s hidden gem: After two months, Florida woman finally gets insurance via healthcare.gov

It took two months, and multiple phone calls and weekly visits to the dysfunctional healthcare.gov, but 60-year-old Floridian JoAnn Smith finally got health insurance last month.

After being blocked since October from purchasing health coverage due to ongoing technical problems at healthcare.gov, Smith at last completed enrollment for a Silver plan from Humana. After calculating her federal subsidy (her employer doesn’t offer coverage and her husband is unemployed), the plan will cost just $3.19 a month to cover herself and her husband.

Smith told NBC News that the premium is “totally mind-blowing,” and that finally making it through the enrollment process made her “instantly burst into tears.”