Blaming or celebrating? How health care reform fits into enrollment messaging

Is the Affordable Care Act something to celebrate or something to blame? It depends who you ask and/or what you read.

By some accounts, ACA is at fault for killing U.S. jobs, shutting down the government and even causing HR practitioners to quit the profession. After the exchanges experienced a rough start when they opened on Oct. 1, the law—and the agencies tasked with implementing it—was blamed for being rushed and ill prepared, despite a three-year head start.

On the other hand, proponents say that many of ACA’s individual provisions are publicly popular. And the crashing of healthcare.gov on the first day of the exchanges? Evidence of the law’s necessity, advocates say, as it means that millions of Americans were eager to take advantage of their newly granted access to affordable health insurance.

For many employers, there’s no question: Health care reform is to blame for bringing higher costs. New requirements—removing lifetime limits, adding more dependents to your plan, adding data to W-2s to name a few—aren’t cheap or simple to implement. The dream of a law that would directly address employers’ primary trouble—health care costs—isn’t a reality.

That’s a hard fact to accept, especially when you’ve been working your tail off to drive change within your own company. No matter how much we try to shape new employee behaviors—to learn to compare costs, to engage with wellness programs or simply to choose a health plan (not default into one)—employees are slow to change.

Still, before you blame health care reform for giving you what seems like yet another full-time job, take a breath. Your frustration will do little to get people engaged in their health care or in making good decisions. Rather, your job at enrollment and year round is to make sure your colleagues and their families have a financial safety net if illness strikes, as well as the tools and resources to improve their health.  

So, even if you blame ACA privately for adding to your company’s administrative and cost burdens, you still can find ways to celebrate the law publicly so that employees get fully on board with plan design or other benefit changes.

First, start with the basics.

Share your strategy with employees: Have you ever told your employees why you offer health care benefits in the first place? Will you slowly increase the wellness incentives, thanks to new, higher limits? Do you plan to make major changes to avoid the “Cadillac” tax?

Then, if you’re making big or small changes this fall, answer for employees, “Why?”

“Why now?” and “What’s in it for me?” How will new wellness program incentives support employees? How will a major shift in your medical plans lower costs? Whatever your plan, find a way to knit the story together so that health care reform messages are brief, fact-based and quickly transition to the enrollment messages. Your messages need to be laser focused on two things: What impacts employees and what they can do.

Regardless of whether 2014 means big changes to your plan, every employee communication about health care is an opportunity to reinforce good health behaviors—comparing health plans, getting preventive care, participating in wellness programs, evaluating costs, using generic drugs. These are the tangible and specific ways employees and their families can control their health and their costs—and that, regardless of your stance on health care reform, is something to celebrate.