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Real Reform In Healthcare

“We want our employees to spend their time on real issues,” said Charlie Salter, VP of Benefits at ConAgra. He means it. Charlie and ConAgra have built their healthcare benefits around some simple concepts that are yielding impressive results. How impressive? Close to flat healthcare cost trend since 2007.

Charlie’s work is part of a growing trend among America’s most innovative companies: Designing healthcare benefits in ways that have a real impact on quality and cost. It’s why I [recently] asked Charlie to share the podium with me in Boca Raton. ConAgra is showing it’s possible to control healthcare costs by helping people do the right thing.

The vision behind ConAgra’s programs is simple: Employees have to be responsible for managing their own care. But, says Charlie, this is easy to say, harder to do. “So we do as much as we can to make it as easy for people to do the right thing.” ConAgra gives its employees a significant financial stake in their well-being, through a health plan that has a $1,500 deductible. ConAgra supplements the plan with a health savings account (HSA) that lets workers use pre-tax dollars to pay for the deductible. Like other HSAs, any money the employee doesn’t spend is theirs to keep. It means employees are more engaged in healthcare decisions. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

Will Large Employers Dump Healthcare Coverage?

Fortune magazine has made some news recently about the impact of healthcare reform on large employers:

Internal documents recently reviewed by Fortune, originally requested by Congress, show what the bill’s critics predicted, and what its champions dreaded: many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the healthcare coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

The only trouble? There’s no way these employers are seriously thinking about doing this.

I can understand why the employers would do the math. According to healthcare reform law, penalties for failing to provide health coverage are a small fraction of the cost of that coverage. But as with most everything else in healthcare, there’s much more to it than just a simple math equation. Here’s what I mean. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

All Healthcare Is Local: Why Employers Self-Insure

“I’m from Massachusetts,” I told the audience.  “So depending on how you feel about reform, I will say either ’sorry,’ or ‘you’re welcome.”

The audience, made up of large employers and benefits professionals seemed to like this.  But it was clear that they were pleased that the health care reform legislation is Congress is pretty well dead now.

Now, if it’s true that health care costs are rising (they are) and this heavily impacts employers (it does) why would the death of a bill meant to address this problem make those people happy?

I’ve written before that part of the problem with the reform bills in Congress is the huge divide between what benefits professionals know about the real world of health care and the things that get “policy wonks” excited.   And so a big reason why these bills never really had widespread support among professional benefits people was because they never made a whole lot of sense to them. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

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I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

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