WGA InsureBlog

As consultants and advocates for our clients, we want our clients to have a broader set of pro-active tools to reduce the cost of health insurance. One of those tools that still is mostly untapped is employer-sponsored Wellness initiatives at the worksite. Wellness is hardly a new concept. Many researchers have reported on the success of Wellness programs but they have been sparsely implemented. One of the biggest problems with Wellness programs is that only some of the gains in health care expense control are achieved in the near term. Many of the gains are not achieved until later in life as a result of decreases in the incidence of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. And given that the average employee changes jobs every seven years or so, many employers feel that the benefits are passed on to future employers. hat poses a problem. How do you incent businesses to pay for Wellness programs when they may not get many of the benefits? Read more…

Wellness programs in the workplace are designed to educate and assist employees to live healthier lives. But there is no denying that the overall health of employees can certainly help to reduce medical costs. Did you know that 15% of employees accrue 78% of medical expenses, and that 75% of health care costs are directly related to lifestyle and are preventable? As we enter the next phase of wellness, we find that many human resources professionals looking for new ways to proactively control their medical costs. We hosted a discussion this week with Interactive Health Solution (IHS), a partner firm that provides health awareness and preventive care programs that can help reduce the severity of claims, and ultimately allows the workforce to be more productive.  Read more…

The House Committee on Rules has just released the 153 page amendment to the Health Reform Bill. The release of these revisions clears the way for a Sunday vote in the House and the potential of passage of Federal Health Care Reform through the controversial reconciliation process. Preliminary CBO scoring is projected at $940 Billion over ten years.

Upon a quick read of the amendments, I wanted to provide a brief summary of a few of the changes to the Senate bill as was passed on Christmas Eve. Read more…

As discussions with my clients shift from “if” to “when” will health reform pass, CFOs and HR managers are expectedly anxious and concerned about protocols and penalties associated with the new rules under Obamacare. For Massachusetts companies, many of the plan design and credible plan requirements were resolved way back in 1996 under small group reform or recently under the 2007 Mass Health reform law. In fact, much of what we are seeing in both the House and Senate versions of reform mirror the Mass reform program in many respects. There is however a potential catch-22 involved with the cost of having a compliant plan; that issue is the Senate pay-for “Cadillac” tax. Read more…

The final Senate Healthcare Bill was released earlier this week with a Manager’s Amendment. Taking a glass half full look at the amendment, a number of the changes have been identified as employer-friendly, such as the elimination of a public plan option, stronger penalties for non-compliance with the individual mandate (designed as motivation to find health insurance coverage) and a $600 penalty for employers who impose a waiting period for health coverage of longer than 60 days, replacing the 30 day limit contained in the original version. Read more…

For months I have worried that the battle over health reform would devolve into a partisan and political battle, pitting ideologies against one another, all the while losing sight of the larger goal. President Obama campaigned on a promise of reducing health care premiums by $2,500 for every family in America. That message appears lost in the bills working their way through Congress. Read more…

As the Senate Finance Committee voted last week, a discouraging report was released from PricewaterhouseCoopers voicing new concerns from the insurance industry about the proposed health care reform legislation. A trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, sponsored the study and contends that some of the healthcare reform efforts being considered are poised to increase insurance premiums, more so than if no action were taken to reform healthcare in America. (For an outline of the provisions that support this claim, check out WGA’s latest installment of This Week in Health Care Reform.) Read more…