Health care reform: Absorbing the new law

We can stop calling it health care reform. Thanks to Congress, we have our newest acronym—PPACA! And most large employers aren’t seeing it as a reason to drop health coverage.

If you read our last blog post, we encouraged you to get something out to employees quickly about health care reform. Gossip breeds in a vacuum. And, no doubt your internal team has been busy with the labor-intensive job of marrying the required and desired plan design changes for 2011. All eyes are on the actuaries—what’s it going to cost to remove lifetime limits? Add children up to age 26? Add to that the myriad of tweaks you may or may not have had in mind last summer when you settled on a 2010 plan design. There are plenty of great summaries of the new law available online like from the Kaiser Family Foundation, The Commonwealth Fund, Inside Health Policy and, of course, the Department of Health and Human Services.

But, it’s really about your people

While the technical folks are working hard with insurance brokers and plan design consultants, are you preparing your internal presentation about the impact to employees? With so much up in the air, as the benefits pros, it’s your job to concisely and succinctly present an approach to loop in employees and their families on plans. To start, remind yourself how your employees and families are using your plans now, using metrics your team already monitors.

• Review business and benefit plan stats. What kind of cutbacks have employees experienced during the economic downturn? How much have employees’ 401(k) balances recovered? Are employees actively opening an HSA and saving via pre-tax deductions if they’re eligible? How many dependents were dropped during your last audit? You’ll need to position any message about health care reform in the context of the reality at your organization—not just the benefits, but the overall business and employee engagement picture.
• Gather all your survey data. This might include engagement data about your benefits over a period of years—illustrating how big benefit changes were perceived. It might also include smaller pulse surveys you conducted on communications in particular. How do your employees feel about benefits now? And, how might that change in the future?
• Run a web analytics report. What pages get the most traffic during specific timeframes such as enrollment? What about the rest of the year? Right now? If you have a blog on your benefits website, what topics generate the most comments? If you have a Twitter feed, what are the trends for re-Tweets?
• Pull all your call center statistics. What are staffing requirements when you have a major benefit headline? What happens when those mailers go out? If you can, put a pricetag on it—it will help as you develop your strategy and the tradeoffs.
• Consider major headlines. The press has been very busy reporting on the new law. Depending on the news source, your employees are hearing a wide range of opinions about the long-term impact of health care reform. Whether reform seems good or bad—and for whom—depends a lot on the source of information. Be sure to consider these wide viewpoints when you think about how to educate employees, who will all be coming from different perspectives and points of view.

Are you busy reframing the big picture?

Your employees have likely been listening to the major headlines for the bill as a whole—the individual mandate being the most discussed. But the mainstream media hasn’t said as much about the impact on employers. You’ll need to educate your employees and their families with clear, objective and detailed information.

• Put it in context. Everything you say about reform and changes to your plans must acknowledge the range of thought in the ongoing public discourse. And, what’s been going on in your organization—including rising health care costs and dependent audits—over the last few years. And quick, before they start assuming things.
• Be transparent. What’s tricky, as you know, is that the bill is phased in over a period of almost ten years and there are a lot of unknowns about how your plans might change. The hope is that health care trend eventually goes down, due to broad changes to the system. In the near term, however, most experts agree that the new requirements won’t do much to curb costs for large employers. Talk about that. Just like every other change to benefits, your employees deserve to understand your thinking.
• Use our free language. Here is a new template for an employee memo to help you frame the major themes in the new law. We’ll be helping with more information in the coming months about how to communicate leading up to open enrollment and how to manage the new communications requirements.

It’s overwhelming. We get it.

No matter what you think of the bill itself, one thing is very certain: as benefits professionals, we have a lot of work to do. And the way forward isn’t totally clear. But, as long as your organization is planning to continue to offer health care benefits to employees, see PPACA as a rare chance to draw attention to health and wellness efforts. Change can be unsettling but it can also create a priceless opportunity to transform the way your employees perceive and use their benefits. And, open and honest communication through the process will create trust and loyalty that will pay dividends for years to come.

We’d like to help you be successful and use health care reform as a catalyst for that positive change. We’ll be updating this blog with suggestions, tips and more sample language. If you have specific questions or would like help creating a long-term strategy, please give us a call!