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Articles: Top companies key in on health insurance

Posted by admin on Tuesday, May 11, 2004 - 12:32 AM

WASHINGTON, May 10 (UPI) -- To mark the first day of "Cover the Uninsured Week," human resource executives announced Monday that more than 50 Fortune 500 companies have created a plan to provide affordable health insurance coverage for about 4 million uninsured working Americans.
The HR Policy Association, an association of human resource executives representing more than 200 of the United States' largest employers and more than 15 million employees worldwide, is leading the Affordable Health Care Solutions Coalition. Taking steps to address issues of access to quality health insurance in a time when 43.6 million Americans have no health insurance coverage, HR Policy Association Chairman William J. Conaty of General Electric said: "In 2003, premiums for job-based health benefits rose by 13.9 percent, the third consecutive year of double-digit premium increases. It's time for a fundamental change, and healthcare market reform is a top priority for the association." J. Randall MacDonald, IBM senior vice president for human resources, said: "Studies clearly show that a lack of insurance leads to poorer health because preventative care and early treatments are avoided. This in turn affects the productivity of our workforce, to the tune of about $150 billion a year." MacDonald, chairman of the HR Policy Association's Health Care Policy Roundtable, provided some grim statistics for the state of U.S. healthcare, reporting that 17 percent of all Americans younger than 65 have no health insurance and that up to 40 percent of healthcare spending is wasteful, with 98,000 deaths annually attributed to medical errors. He added that the number of uninsured Americans is expected to increase by one-third in six years, to total 63 million, unless drastic measures are taken. The companies that compose the coalition have agreed to provide health insurance coverage that will be less expensive that what is available in the individual insurance market and have fewer barriers to entry for their uninsured employees and dependents, including temporary, contract, and part-time workers, pre-65 retirees without group options, students who no longer qualify for their parents' health insurance plan and COBRA health insurance participants who have exceeded their 18-month coverage. "The larger the group of potential targeted individuals that we can assemble, the greater the opportunity we will have to provide a broad set of affordable benefits to more people who need them," said Greg Lee, senior vice president for human resources at Sears, Roebuck and Co. In addition to improving access to healthcare for the coalitions' employees and dependents nationwide, six regional initiatives will take place in six regions where the coalition's companies employ between 5 and 15 percent of the workforce: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York. "At the moment, 25 large companies employing several hundred thousand Americans are committed to the regional initiative," said John Butler, chairman of the regional initiatives and chief HR officer for Textron Inc. "Our intent is to have the first regional initiatives up and running on a pilot basis in three to four major metropolitan areas by January 2006." The HR Policy Association has written a 104-page white paper entitled "Leadership Action Plan on the Uninsured: A Strategy for Achieving Lasting Health Care Market Reform," the executive summary of which is available at hcpr.org.

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