Health Care Reform
- The 11th circuit rules that health care law is unconstitutional. But before anyone gets too excited, the only part that they took issue with was the individual mandate. Their rationale was that the individual mandate exceeds Congress’ commerce power. So there are two possible outcomes: (1) the Supreme Court will agree and the individual mandate will be severed from the rest of the law or (2) the Supreme Court will not agree and the law will remain as is. All in all, not a particularly earth-shattering outcome – the only thing that was interesting about this particular case was that this was the first time that it was not a partisan ruling.
- Birth control for women falls under preventive care and will no longer require a copay. And, of course, I didn’t see anything that covered birth control for men, namely condoms, for no charge. Maybe one day they’ll get around to adding more forms of birth control to the definition of preventive care.
Other Health News
- SF Health Care Ordinance rates increase for 2012. Have fun with the reporting!
- COBRA – just always offer it. No one ever seems to win COBRA cases when COBRA isn’t offered due to gross misconduct.
- Keep personal and occupational health info separate says the EEOC. Some things just don’t mix.
- Walgreens to sell health insurance. If that happens, CVS will probably follow suit. The health insurance market can use some more players.
Retirement Plans
- Fewer large employers offering new employees defined benefit plans aka pension plans. I wonder how many more years it’ll be before they no longer exist at all?
- Aon Hewitt released its Annual Defined Contribution Plan Survey showing that automation is key trend along with providing more tools and services all while reducing cost.
Latest Research
- Poorly controlled asthma is costly. This is somewhat obvious but the researchers quantify how much asthma can cost and this might help in cost calculations for asthma disease management programs.
- Why people like video games. Since I’ve talked about gamification, I thought that this was interesting research about why people like video games.
- Mammograms seen as ineffective in Europe. This is more research questioning the use of mammograms.
- School obesity prevention program can curb medical costs. In the high tech industry, it’s common to have K-12 outreach. Maybe we need to start investing in health to stave off future high health costs.
