Employer Strategies

In November 2010, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Treasury, and Labor provided some relief to employers sponsoring fully insured group health plans by amending the interim final rules on grandfathered plan status under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Last month, the Center for Health Value Innovation released its 2010 Value-Based Design Report - a study of more than 170 companies, representing more than 4 million covered lives, produced in partnership with Buck Consultants - which takes the national temperature on how value-based benefits designs are progressing in U.S. workplaces.

Some of you may remember exercise instructors such as Jane Fonda or the late Jack LaLanne. When I was a kid, my mom had Jack LaLanne exercise books.

For once, we weren't trying to innovate, iterate or invest in something new. We simply wanted to successfully launch a consumer-driven health plan. We thought it would be easy, since many employers had already delved into these issues before us.

For many of us who travel by plane, post-9/11 security restrictions have changed the way we prepare. Our packing has changed, our attire has changed and we now enter the airport hoping to make it through the screening, scanning and patting down with our humor intact.

You are busy preparing your company's benefits open enrollment memo when the phone rings. It's Elizabeth from Operations, thanking you profusely because she just read in the newspaper that she can cover her 25-year-old son on the company's medical insurance plan.

The ink is barely dry on our 2011 calendars, and here in Palm Beach County we're already finding ourselves in the thick of a request for proposal for our self-insured health plan for 2012.

Employers like to look over one another's shoulder when it comes to benefits programs, and benchmarking data provides this opportunity.

Health care reform has been good for business - true or false? These days, it still depends on whom you ask. Ask a producer who sells critical care insurance, though, and the answer you'll probably get is "true."

Voluntary benefits is often referred to as "worksite marketing." Many carriers, in fact, refer to their voluntary products as "worksite voluntary benefits." Recent developments in enrollment technology, however, are rapidly making the term "worksite" obsolete and no longer relevant to the voluntary benefits process. The term "worksite" derives from how these benefits have had to be enrolled. As products that are voluntarily purchased by employees, the only consistently effective means of presenting (and selling) them have been one-on-one employee meetings with licensed benefit counselors (enrollers) at the workplace during the workday.