By LOUISE RADNOFSKY

Catholic bishops said Friday night that they would not support the Obama administration’s proposed compromise on a controversial rule that requires most employers to fully cover contraception in their workers’ health plans.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which had led opposition to the regulation, issued a statement saying that they didn’t believe their concerns were addressed by a new policy offered by President Barack Obama on Friday morning to allow religious employers who object to the use of birth control to turn over responsibility for covering it to insurance companies.

Under the new policy, religious employers that don’t want to offer contraception could exclude it from their policies. Insurance companies instead would be required to provide access to contraception for plan participants who wanted it, without explicitly charging either the religious employer or worker.

The shift is intended to ensure that women working at religious hospitals, schools and charities who want to use contraception can obtain it in the same way as women who work for secular employers. It also means the cost of providing the coverage for those women is likely to be spread across all policyholders by insurers.

The bishops had earlier expressed cautious optimism about the announcement, saying that it was “a first step in the right direction” but that they would have to study it.

In their later statement, they said they still had “serious moral concerns,” noting that the proposal didn’t contain provisions for religious employers who self-insure, meaning the employer takes on the underlying risk of covering employees’ health care.

The bishops also said that the current structure of the proposal meant that if an employee and insurer agreed to add contraception coverage to a health plan, it would still be financed in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the employer.

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“These changes require careful moral analysis, and moreover, appear subject to some measure of change. But we note at the outset that the lack of clear protection… is unacceptable and must be corrected,” the statement said.

The White House declined to comment.

Under the health-care law passed in March 2010, insurers must cover preventive care at no out-of-pocket cost for consumers. The Institute of Medicine recommended that all forms of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration be included on the list of covered services.

The bishops also said that they were unlikely to be satisfied by changes that affected only religious employers, since they still had “grave” objections to the overall mandate, which includes the morning-after pill and sterilization.

The later statement came after leading members of the conference reviewed the proposal, among them president Archbishop Timothy Dolan and the two men who chair its committees on doctrine and what the church calls “pro-life activities,” the cardinals Donald Wuerl and Daniel DiNardo. Archbishop Dolan will be elevated to the rank of cardinal next week.

President Obama telephoned the archbishop to tell him of the announcement Friday morning. The bishops said they hadn’t been previously consulted about the proposal.

“We note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions….The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is… to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services,” they wrote.

It isn’t clear what effect the bishops’ objections will have on the Catholic community, which had already been divided in its initial response to the proposal, and to the health-care law as a whole.

Several Catholic organizations praised the administration compromise after it was announced, including the hospitals group the Catholic Health Association and Catholic Charities USA.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Donald Wuerl is a cardinal. In an earlier version of this article, he was incorrectly identified as a bishop.

Caring for an elderly relative isn’t just costly and time-consuming—studies show it could even harm your own health. Now, some companies and nonprofits are rolling out free and low-cost professional help for family caregivers.

Genworth Financial, a large long-term-care insurer, and AARP, the membership group for older Americans, on Thursday introduced a new service for AARP members through which the families of older adults with dementia and other illnesses can assess their needs and develop a care plan—either online, over the phone or in person with a registered nurse. (Genworth already has marketed long-term-care insurance with AARP’s logo for nearly five years.)

The program’s fees vary depending on the service used, starting with online access all the way up to an in-home assessment and help finding local home-health aides, facilities or other medical providers to match those needs.

Improving Dementia Care

Separately, service provider Home Instead Senior Care has started training its home-care workers in new techniques and strategies to improve care for dementia patients—and is starting to offer the same instruction at no cost online and in person to family caregivers.

“Families need help keeping their loved one safe and mentally engaged and stimulated, and managing difficult behaviors,” says Jeff Huber, Home Instead’s president.

To that end, Home Instead developed a life journal, designed to collect information about a patient’s history “to create a much more effective caring experience,” he says.

The financial toll on family caregivers who are 50 or older averages $303,880 a person in lost lifetime wages, pensions and Social Security benefits, according to a June 2011 analysis of U.S. Heath and Retirement Study data by the nonprofit National Alliance for Caregiving and others.

The toll on one’s health also can be significant. Taking care of a family member with Alzheimer’s disease could make your own health-care bills increase by an average of $4,766 a year, according to a separate study that the National Alliance for Caregiving released in November. It also found that family caregivers make visits to emergency rooms, doctors and hospitals at higher rates than others the same age.

Unpaid Caregivers

More than 43 million Americans serve as unpaid caregivers for adults who are 50 and older (the age at which you can join AARP), and nearly one in four say they have a difficult time coordinating care, according to a 2009 study by the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with AARP, which has some 40 million members.

The new service, formally known as AARP Caregiving Help and Advice from Genworth ranges from $12.99 for six months of online access to $149 for a phone assessment, a service plan and six months of online access, to $489 for an in-home consultation. Adding the “service finder” option—which includes researching local availability, providing quality ratings, negotiating discounts and coordinating the start of care—brings the phone total to $295 and the in-person bill to $665.

Genworth has offered the assessment and matchmaking service to its long-term-care policyholders for four years. Ralph Cummins, a 51-year-old marketing consultant in Richmond, Va., sought help from the insurer in late 2010 when his mother was facing knee-replacement surgery, which would require a short stay afterward at a rehabilitation center, at the same time that she was caring at home for his father, who had cancer.

Genworth provided information on rehab centers, pinpointing the closest one to his parents’ home, and also in-home health-care providers.

“I only had to make about five phone calls instead of 100 phone calls,” Mr. Cummins says. “I would have had no idea where to start. It was overwhelming.”

Home Instead Senior Care, for its part, is trying to help caregivers—both its own 70,000 paid workers and the public—better meet the needs of people with Alzheimer’s.

“Rather than trying to force Alzheimer’s patients to live in our world in the here and now,” Home Instead’s Mr. Huber says, “we need to meet them in the past.”

For example, one of Home Instead’s clients in Omaha, Neb., where it is based, had served in the military. To persuade him to take a bath—something Alzheimer’s patients often have an aversion to—his caregiver told him a general was coming for inspection and he needed to get ready. He immediately took a bath, Mr. Huber says.

Prolonging Time at Home

Such simple strategies, he adds, can help people with Alzheimer’s prolong their time at home as well.

By the end of this year, all of the company’s 600-plus franchised locations expect to offer Alzheimer’s training for caregivers. And in May, it plans to post an online course at the Help for Alzheimer’s Families website, which already has other resources.

These new programs come on top of free services offered by the U.S. Administration on Aging’s Eldercare Locator, which connects older adults and families to local agencies, and the nonprofit National Council on Aging’s BenefitsCheckUp site, which provides screening for more than 2,000 public and private programs.

More good news: The U.S. Tax Court ruled last year that in-home personal care can qualify as a deductible long-term-care expense if it is prescribed by a doctor for a person who meets the definition of “chronically ill.” Taxpayers generally can deduct such costs as medical expenses if they exceed 7.5% of their adjusted gross income.

—Email: familyvalue@wsj.com

By EMILY MALTBY

Rebecca Minkoff was struggling to launch a fashion line in 2005 when her brother, an entrepreneur who founded Fortis Software LLC, stepped in.

Uri Minkoff put his savings into what is now Rebecca Minkoff LLC of New York. The company is known for its bags, which are carried in department stores such as Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom. Sales were $35 million in 2011, according to Mr. Minkoff, the chief executive. Its top seller is the Morning After clutch, at about $300.

The siblings tapped Mr. Minkoff’s connections to gain recognition with fashion bloggers and Hollywood trendsetters. Still, the brand lacks a strong overseas following and the pair face significant challenges as they try to expand their sales of apparel and footwear. The siblings sat down with The Wall Street Journal in their showroom last week. Edited excerpts:

When handbag designer Rebecca Minkoff was just starting out, she turned to her business-savvy brother Uri for help. Now the two of them run a burgeoning fashion empire expected to do $35 million in sales. Off Duty spent time with the siblings and learned how their relationship helped build a brand.

Starting Out

Ms. Minkoff: I started the company in 2001 and it went until 2004. I called my dad and said, “I’m out of money,” and he said, “I’m not going to help you out, but call your brother, and he might.”

Mr. Minkoff: We agreed she’d take over the design function and I’d do the business functions. There was one rule: She couldn’t have a boyfriend that would negatively impact the company. I didn’t want the drama.

Ms. Minkoff: If we can’t resolve a dispute ourselves, we call our dad. But that’s only happened a couple times.

Building the Brand

Ms. Minkoff: I was sewing apparel. And then [actress] Jenna Elfman asked if I could design a bag for a film she was going to do. I came out with the Morning After bag.

Mr. Minkoff: One of our friends…was a buyer for a boutique in Los Angeles. She wrote about [it] on DailyCandy.com. Orders just started to come in like crazy.

Ms. Minkoff: We went to Home Depot to buy the hardware components like metallic rings, clasps and hooks. I would clean out all the Home Depots. We couldn’t afford an office. Buyers would come for meetings, and my roommates would walk out in their robes.

Mr. Minkoff:The biggest blunder was our first experience working with an Asian factory. They actually took another brand’s hardware and put it on our product. We caught it very quickly, but some products came out with this very, very successful brand’s logo on the hardware.

Expanding the Brand

Mr. Minkoff: We don’t have any outside investors. We had to be pragmatic. Every dollar counted. I had maxed out my credit cards, and had gotten a home credit line from the bank. Once, my wife and I went shopping and she said, “Why is the American Express not working?” I said, “Well, we used it for the company, but I’ve got a good handbag for you.”

Between the ages of 20 and 30, there are a lot of important experiences that a girl will go through… large moments in her life. We had products that related to the experience—the Lovers Clutch, the Affair, the Swoon, the Luscious, the Devote Tote.

[By] early 2007, social media really started to take [off]. On the Internet…people were talking about our product and talking about Rebecca. We decided to create a relationship with the end customer. That way we could direct her to a store, a website, or to an event Rebecca was going to have.

[By the 2008 recession], luxury [bags] were being discounted to $795. So we lowered our prices by about 15% to 20%. We took the Wrigley’s model: We’re going to take this price hit … but we’re going to sell more.

Instead of just having products at $495, $595, we started offering products from $195 to $595. We grew 546% through the recession. We’re on track to hit about $55 million in sales this year.

Debut in Japan

Ms. Minkoff:When you start as an apparel designer, it makes sense in people’s minds that you can do bags and shoes. But when people predominantly know you for accessories, they don’t think you can design apparel.

Mr. Minkoff: Last year we only did about 8% to 10% overseas. So it’s a gigantic growth opportunity. We are opening our first stores in Japan in March. Japan is an amazing place of trendsetting. If we can nail Japan well, it can really lead us as we grow.

Write to Emily Maltby at emily.maltby@wsj.com

The federal government is trying to ease the way for workers to buy annuities with their retirement savings. The goal: to create a source of income that people can’t outlive.

Insurers, already seeing demand for such products, are rolling out new annuities, which provide fixed lifetime payments in return for a lump sum and have been widely available outside of retirement plans for years.

Obama administration officials have been wrestling with the challenge of funding retirement across lengthening lifetimes and amid dwindling traditional “defined-benefit” pension plans. Those, of course, largely have been replaced with 401(k) and other “defined-contribution” plans, in which workers shoulder all of the risk involved in making their savings last.

Annuities have their own set of drawbacks, including steep fees for income guarantees, fixed payments that could lose purchasing power amid future inflation and complicated mechanics that can take hundreds of pages to explain. But they have a trump card over most other retirement investments: You can’t outlive their guaranteed lifetime payments.

The Treasury Department on Thursday rolled out a proposal making it possible to buy “longevity” annuities with a portion of savings in employer-sponsored retirement plans, including 401(k)s. A separate proposal pushes partial annuity options for traditional pension plans. And a ruling issued on Thursday clarifies how protections for workers and their spouses apply to annuities in retirement plans.

Here’s what the new proposals address.

Longevity annuities. These can provide a cost-effective way for people early in retirement, typically 65 to 70 years old, to help address the risk of outliving their assets by buying a predictable income stream with a portion of their retirement savings that would start at age 80 or 85. Once a retiree knows how long the remaining nest egg has to last, managing those savings is much less stressful.

The current barrier: Workers have to start taking required minimum distributions from retirement accounts at age 70½, including the value of an annuity within the plan. Under the Treasury proposal, an annuity that costs no more than 25% of the account balance, up to $100,000, and that begins by age 85, would be disregarded when calculating required withdrawals.

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Having backup income late in life could be a big help. A 65-year-old woman has a 50-50 chance of living past age 86, and the same-aged man has an even chance of living past age 84, according to the Social Security Administration’s 2011 annual report.

While only 17% of 65 to 69 year olds get most of their income (90% or more) from Social Security, 33% of those who are 80 and over do so.

Partial annuities. At the same time life expectancies have been increasing, the use of lifetime-income tools in pension plans has been dwindling, according to a Treasury report. Defined-benefit plans are being phased out, and the ones left standing are increasingly offering lump-sum payouts.

Rather than leaving workers in defined-benefit pension plans with a choice between cash or a traditional pension, the Treasury proposal would make it simpler for such plans to offer both by streamlining the calculation of a partial annuity. That way a retiree could convert part of his account to fixed payments and keep the rest invested.

Spousal benefits. A revenue ruling also resolved uncertainty about how 401(k) rules that protect spouses’ benefits apply when an employee chooses a deferred annuity.

Under the rules, a worker who elected a single-life annuity—one with a benefit that would end when the worker dies, rather than continuing for the surviving spouse—has to get his or her spouse’s written consent. The ruling spells out terms that don’t require spousal consent until the annuity begins, at which point the insurer issuing the annuity, rather than the employer plan, would handle it, according to a Treasury fact sheet.

New products. Even before the government’s recent round of proposals and rulings, insurers were starting to experiment with annuities in 401(k)s. In January, ING introduced a “lifetime-income protection” program that gradually would move retirement assets from target-date funds into variable annuities with minimum guaranteed withdrawal benefits.

The annuities carry a 1% annual fee, and fund fees can range from 1.3% to 1.6%, with total fees maxing out at 2%. One-third of a worker’s savings would be moved into the annuity 17 years before retirement, with the entire account invested in the annuity five years from retirement, says Richard Mason, president of corporate markets at ING’s U.S. retirement division.

Firms including Aegon’s Diversified Investment Advisors, AllianceBernstein, BlackRock, Manulife Financial‘s John Hancock, Prudential Financial and UBS also have tried adding annuities with guaranteed payouts to their target-date offerings in the past few years.

Write to Kelly Greene at kelly.greene@wsj.com

By BEN WORTHEN

(See Corrections and Amplifications item below.)

Relief may be on the way for small businesses stuck with bad Web addresses.

Next year, the organization that oversees the Internet will start selling rights to an unlimited number of new top-level domains — the suffixes like .com that appear at the end of Web-site names. Domains likely to appear include those that take their names from popular subjects, types of businesses and geographic locations, such as .books, .flowers and .nyc.

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• See the complete Small Business report.

The good news for small businesses is that if a company currently has a .com address that is cumbersome or hard to remember, like joesflowersnyc.com, it may soon get a shot at a new address that’s identical to the name of the company, or one that is just easier to find on the Web — say, joes.flowers or joesflowers.nyc.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, plans to sell the new domains for prices starting at $100,000, which is likely to start bidding wars for the most popularly sought domains — and to limit the bidding to parties with deep pockets.

But those purchasers will then turn around and sell the rights to subaddresses within their new domains — addresses ending with, say, .books or .flowers — for far less; in most cases, around $50 a year, experts say.

Industry insiders and observers agree that .com is still the Boardwalk and Park Place of the Internet. Because it’s the best-known top-level domain, even proponents of the new suffixes say that in a perfect world, a small business should sign up for a .com Web site with its name. The problem is, so many .com addresses are already taken — about 80 million of them.

.Com and Gone

“The issue that many people face is that ‘.com’ is not available for them,” says Delphine Parlier, co-founder of Quensis, a Paris-based consulting company that helps businesses with Web branding. The land grab is so complete, Ms. Parlier says, that every word in the English language has been taken, as has every letter combination between two and five letters. When businesses do choose to sign up for a .com address, they’re often left to pick from wordy leftovers.

Daniel Baxter

ICANN has already made a handful of other generic top-level domains available, such as .net, .info and .biz. But sites ending in these suffixes haven’t had much succcess. Hence the plan to let people create and purchase domain names of their own choosing. Leaving the choice to the marketplace, the thinking goes, will result in top-level domains and addresses that are more relevant and used more.

“This is the biggest change to the way people find each other on the Internet since its inception,” says Paul Twomey, ICANN’s president and chief executive officer.

Most of the entrepreneurs and Internet businesses planning to apply for generic names like .perfume are staying mum on their plans, largely because the $100,000 application fee is nonrefundable. ICANN, of Marina del Rey, Calif., has said that it might auction off top-level domains that attract multiple applicants, or it might try to get competing parties to come to a resolution themselves. The organization, whose plans are still in flux, spent around $10 million laying the groundwork for the new addresses and says it just wants to make its money back.

It’s hard to predict which topical top-level domains, say, .flowers or .florist, will prove more relevant. Picking an address in one of these new top-level domains “is like buying a lottery ticket,” says Ray Valdes, an analyst at the technology-research company Gartner Inc. “I wouldn’t base a marketing strategy around that anytime soon.”

Location, Location …

Geographic domains, however, may be a safer bet. Several civic groups have come forward with plans to apply for top-level domains for their cities. “All business is local, and this is especially true for small and medium businesses,” says Dirk Krischenowski, founder of dotBERLIN, a group that’s pursuing .berlin as the top-level domain for Germany’s capital. “Domain names in the last decade have become a fundamental tool, like a street address,” Mr. Krischenowski says.

Businesses, civic organizations and individuals from the city would all qualify for an address ending in .berlin, Mr. Krischenowski says of his group’s prospective plan. He anticipates charging €20 to €30 ($29 to $43) a year for an address, or three or four times what a Web site costs now. He would also maintain some control over who could have a particular address. For example, hotels.berlin would be reserved for a consortium that would provide information about all the hotels in the city, he says.

One person excited about getting a .berlin address is Jürgen Wittke, chief executive of the Berlin Chamber of Crafts. His organization’s current Web site is www.hwk-berlin.de, one of about 100,000 sites that have the city’s name following a hyphen.

Mr. Wittke says he plans to sign up for handwerkskammer.berlin, which he says is much more intuitive. “All companies which now add ‘-berlin’ to their firm name will be much easier to find on the Internet” if they switch to .berlin, he says. The top-level domain will also help build an online identity for the city, Mr. Wittke says.

But others fear that adding new top-level domains will cause more problems than it solves. “The decision to allow anyone to start their own top-level domain has the potential for widespread user confusion,” says a spokeswoman for Google Inc., the Internet-search giant, based in Mountain View, Calif. Someone looking for the Web site of Citigroup Inc.’s Citibank, for example, might not know whether to go to Citibank.com, the bank’s current Web site, or to citibank.citibank or citibank.bank.

Still, Google officials say the company plans to include the new addresses in its search results when the new domains start appearing. And regarding the order in which search results are listed, Google says Web sites in the new domains will be subject to the same criteria as other sites: The most relevant sites will be listed first. Google says it hasn’t made any changes to its search engine to prepare for the new top-level domains. However, if a site using .nyc were to be ranked highly in the results of a Google search involving New York City, it would make getting one of these addresses more important.

“We have the opportunity to do the same thing that city planning did for the Internet,” says Thomas Lowenhaupt, a New Yorker who is leading an effort to get .nyc. Mr. Lowenhaupt says that if he’s successful, he would limit .nyc addresses to people who live in the city or organizations and businesses that operate there.

That’s fine with Maureen Allen, president of the Kiwanis Club of Jackson Heights, in New York City. “When you live in a large city like New York, it’s different than a small town where everyone gets an update about what’s happening at the corner candy store,” she says. Having .nyc Web sites would be a way to build that community, Ms. Allen says.

No matter what domain someone registers, small-business owners should be prepared to market their Web sites, says Tim Switzer, vice president of registry services for NeuStar Inc., the Sterling, Va., company that oversees the .biz and .us top-level domains. Making sure people know about a Web site is the best way to get visitors, says Mr. Switzer.

“It’s not the domain name that matters but what you do with it,” he says.

—Mr. Worthen, a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, writes the Journal’s Business Technology blog at WSJ.com/biztech.

Write to Ben Worthen at ben.worthen@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Afilias Ltd. administers the .info Internet domain. A previous version of this article incorrectly said NeuStar Inc. administers the .info domain.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page R10