A corporate health care exchange run by Aon Hewitt is “open and ready for business,” according to Ken Sperling, global health & benefits practice leader for the human resource consulting firm. Aon Hewitt Announced last week that it is launching the exchange for employer groups of 1,000 or more full-time employees beginning as early as January 2012. While the infrastructure — based on Aon Hewitt’s existing retiree benefit exchange model with 2.4 million participants — is built, the timing depends on securing a viable number of both employer and insurance company participants.
“It’s a little bit of a ‘Catch 22’ in that the insurance companies won’t come to play unless there are employers ready to do this and the employers aren’t going to be willing to play unless the insurance companies come,” says Sperling. “So we are talking to both employers and insurance companies simultaneously and both have agreed that when there is a committed volume of employees there will be insurance companies who are eager to take on that volume, insure that risk and make this work.”
