Times of stress and crises heighten the senses, clear travel calendars, and renew our focus. For those on the business side of healthcare working on benefits purchasing, data, or analytics, this is a great moment to collaborate, to share and seek out data sets to help your clients and business. The clouds of the internet…
Category: Thought Leadership
A Tale of $2,000
Whether Einstein said it or not, compound interest is amazing: “…the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it earns it, he who doesn’t, pays it.” Negative compounding is powerful too, and we pay it in the form of healthcare inflation. Over the last 10 years, annual healthcare inflation for workers has averaged 5%,…
The Most Important Signal
In a sea of experiences, AI, and new solutions claiming to make us healthier, when it comes to employer-sponsored healthcare, for most employees, what matters most is the almighty dollar. The cash we pay is king. Payroll contributions. That’s the critical number. Independent of insurance structure, whose logo is on your insurance card, network types,…
Why Some Companies Care More About Healthcare Costs
How much do healthcare costs matter to companies’ earnings? Relative to earnings they’re larger than many think. 24%. That’s the median estimated healthcare costs as a percentage of earnings for the S&P 1000 (the lesser-known index sibling of the S&P 500). I ran an analysis of data from S&P 1000 firms and filtered for those…
Amazon’s Health Benefits
Last year I posted a question on Quora asking what healthcare benefits and cost sharing were like at Google. A few answers of the “it’s private” or “No, I can’t say” variety soon surfaced. They have sense been oddly scrubbed from the site. Why the secrecy? Rich benefits are a given at Google. Time spent…