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Does The Net Promoter Score Matter in Healthcare?

by Thought Leadership

If you rent a car, have cable or internet, or health insurance, your experiences are likely to be less stellar than if you use Netflix or shop at Nordstrom. TV providers show up late for your appointment, and, since they feel for you, they raise your bill after six months. Conversely, Netflix charges $10.99/month and spends billions on great content; I worked at Nordstrom during college, and though I never had someone try to return a tire, I can attest that their service, training, and return po ...

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A New Salary Negotiation Tool: Healthcare Benefits

by Benefits Tools

Over 30 million people in the United States start a new job every year*. We rely on past salary anchoring, asking around, the walls of internal company salary ranges, and sites like Glassdoor, to now know how much others are making in salaries and bonuses. But what about benefits? Often the biggest dollars outside salaries and bonuses are spent on healthcare: ~$10,000 per employee per year and highly valued by job seekers. A great piece appeared on HBR's site about how important they are. As a n ...

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The Walmart Effect on Healthcare

by InvestingMacro Trends

The 2006 book The Wal-Mart Effect describes the retailer's impact on communities and suppliers. Since it was written, a lot has changed. Amazon has outperformed Walmart in the stock market by 20x. Walmart has also dropped the hyphen from its name. Walmart still does $57,000,000 per hour in sales, or $500B per year, and has 2.3M employees worldwide. With that size comes clout: twice in the last week the markets have shuddered as Walmart heft has influenced key businesses. The first came from Syn ...

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Trends, Big Numbers, and Risks: Lessons from UHC’s Earnings

by Macro Trends

It's July and that means earnings season. We get a view of the workings of UnitedHealth Group ("UHC"), the "diversified health care company dedicated to helping people live healthier lives and helping make the health system work better for everyone." We've all carried a United Healthcare card at one point. UHC is the largest healthcare company in the US and has a long list of impressive stats: over $200B in revenue, 27M people enrolled in commercial plans, close to 10M Medicare Advantage and Med ...

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Why Employer-Provided Healthcare is Here to Stay

by Macro TrendsThought Leadership

No economist, junior high student, employee, or small business owner* in the United States thinks healthcare should be tied to employment. Ask around. It's equally unpopular across the political spectrum. But we have it, and it's not by accident, but rather an unintended consequence of the 1942 Stabilization Act. The WW2 era Act led to wage freezes. Unable to raise salaries, and thanks to a later IRS ruling, employers added healthcare coverage as tax-free compensation. It made sense to employers ...