About Benefits Babble
Benefits in Plain English

nerdy benefits lady

The Babel Fish is a creation of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (which should be required reading). It is a fish which, when placed in your ear, will live there and translate any form of language for you.

Benefits Babble is a blog for anyone looking for information about how health care and other employee benefits work – both from the perspective of an employer who runs benefit plans as well as the people who have to interact with our wacky US health care system. I hope to be your own personal Babel Fish, helping translate employee benefits into plain English.

My Promise to You

There’s a quote from Galileo Galilei that I have always loved:

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

I’m a total nerd. I love learning. I never plan on stopping. My main goal with this blog is to continually share what I’ve learned with you. Why reinvent the wheel?

About Shana Sweeney

I’m a nerdy, analytical type gal. I love taking concepts and ideas, deconstructing them and putting them back together in more efficient ways. I just want systems, processes, and things to work well. Always. Perfectly.

The US health care system represents everything I abhor – inefficient, chaotic, incomprehensible, and supported predominantly with an archaic infrastructure.

So I decided to learn about it in depth – spending the last 15 years on it. I worked at a large insurance company for awhile. I worked at an employer running a company’s benefit plans. And I’ve had the misfortune of being a patient with a catastrophic medical condition (premature twins). I learned a lot in the process. I learned so much that in addition to this blog, I also am a contributing editor for Employee Benefits News.

And because I can’t just do one thing without getting bored, I also do various other Human Resources type work – particularly in the areas of compensation and HR technology, and process improvement. I also work on a startup. So sometimes I might end up writing about those things too.

Let’s Stay In Touch!

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Want to contribute?

If you would like to contribute a guest post, I’d love to hear from you. Just send me a note.

Questions, concerns, tips to share, favorite books?

Contact me at: shana@benefitsbabble.com or by sending a note in the form below: