Affordable defined contribution health plans can help employers get through challenging times

Defined contribution health plans, modeled on defined contribution retirement plans, seem to be the wave of the future. At a time when employers and employees alike are trying to contain their health care costs, and employers fight to retain their workers, defined contribution health plans can provide solutions for both employers and employees. The health purchasing alliance model has met with success in both the small and mid-size market.     

Small business no longer has to mean small benefits

The Internet has drastically changed the benefits environment for small businesses. Formerly, employers with a small workforce were severely limited in providing benefits to their employees. Today, by utilizing the Web, many owners of small businesses are offering their employees benefit packages comparable to those offered at major corporations. This author offers suggestions for effective benefit shopping on the Internet.     

Onboarding: delivering on the promise

The nursing workforce continues to age and exit the workplace. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies indicate as many as 40% will retire or are considering retirement. Fewer qualified graduates are in place to replace aging baby boomers, leading to a knowledge and skills gap as well as a numbers gap. Globalization of the nursing workforce has increased competition for all employers to find, hire, and retain good employees.     

Allowing employees to pick the one "that's good for you"

Point-of-service plans offer advantages to be employers and employees as both groups seek affordable quality health care.     

金融危机视野下的雇佣安全

在当前的金融危机背景下,组织不再承诺提供稳定和安全的就业,雇主和雇员的心理契约正在发生变化。在新的雇佣关系中,工作保障并不是建立在企业内部,而是建立在员工的可雇佣性上。为应对雇佣的不安全性,员工个人需要主动维持和开发自身的可雇佣性;组织应不断向员工提供现代化的技能培训机会以提高员工在公司外求职的能力;政府和社会应对雇佣双方权势不对等的现状予以关注,为求职者创建"体面"工作的就业环境。     

Life cycle benefits

Life cycle benefits are designed to meet the needs of employees throughout the stages of life. Many employers in both the public and private sectors are finding that this approach to benefits makes sense from a number of perspectives.     

Personalized mobile advertising: Its key attributes,trends, and social impact

Advertising media are a means of communication that creates different marketing and communication results among consumers. Over the years, newspaper, magazine, TV, and radio have provided a one-way media where information is broadcast and communicated. Due to the widespread application of the Internet, advertising has entered into an interactive communications mode. In the advent of 3G broadband mobile communication systems and smartphone devices, consumers' preferences can be pre-identified and advertising messages can therefore be delivered to consumers in a multimedia format at the right time and at the right place with the right message. In light of this new advertisement possibility, designing personalized mobile advertising to meet consumers' needs becomes an important issue. This research uses the fuzzy Delphi method to identify the key personalized attributes in a personalized mobile advertising message for different products. Results of the study identify six important design attributes for personalized advertisements: price, preference, promotion, interest, brand, and type of mobile device. As personalized mobile advertising becomes more integrated in people's daily activities, its pros and cons and social impact are also discussed. The research result can serve as a guideline for the key parties in mobile marketing industry to facilitate the development of the industry and ensure that advertising resources are properly used.     

DOES THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE MATTER FOR DEFINED CONTRIBUTION PLANS?

We find that sensitivity of fund flows and fund performance are both related to participants' right to choose their investments in defined contribution plans. Under the Mandatory Provident Fund system of Hong Kong, both employers and employees are required to contribute to a retirement account. Originally, employees' investment choices were restricted to a subset of funds chosen by their employers. The system was later modified so that employees are allowed to invest in any fund within the system. We present evidence that flows of fund have become more sensitive to past fund performance after this policy change, and that average fund performance in the system has also improved. Based on the improvement in fund performance, we estimate the accumulated cost of the lack of choice to be around 10% of the current total asset value of the system. (JEL G14, G18)     

Managed indemnity insurance--a clear choice for health plan sponsors

HOMs will undoubtedly remain the primary health plan choice for a significant portion of the nation's employers. However, some employers may find that managed indemnity insurance is more effective in meeting their needs and those of their employees.     

Changing the way employee benefit communications are produced: outsourcing, a more efficient, less costly process

Outsourcing may offer employers an efficient, cost-effective way to produce employee benefit communications. It offers a way to utilize the latest technology to produce personalized benefit statements or to target an announcement of benefit changes to a specific group of employees.     

Psychiatric treatment programs: the continuous services model

With the inclusion of behavioral managed care in the design of many benefit plans, the delivery of psychiatric care has changed. The continuous services model offers advantages for both employers and employees who utilize mental health benefits.     

Medicare risk HMOs: careful consideration can yield rewards

Enlightened employers have discovered that Medicare HMOs, especially risk HMOs, offer employees and retirees a win-win alternative. They lower today's costs, controlling-term increases and offer the broadest, quality coverage. Implementing a "winning" Medicare risk HMO requires careful scrutiny of how the HMO operates and delivers care to the Medicare audience and depends on effective communication that is sensitive to the special needs of retirees.     

Hospitals and philanthropy as partners in funding nursing education

The current nursing shortage is complex and varies widely across the country, and remedial approaches lack adequate funding from the federal government. Lasting remedies must originate from new and different partnerships between multiple institutions with complementary missions in these markets. Hospitals as major nurse employers and foundations that leverage critical sources of financing have a vital role in partnerships. Together they promote and require new entrepreneurial skills, innovative educational strategies, and greater accountability in meeting area workforce needs.     

Evaluate and communicate health care benefits

Both employers and employees need appropriate information to make intelligent decisions about health care benefits. For employers, analysis of health care data offers an approach to monitoring quality care and can provide a tool for controlling costs. For employees, an education and communication strategy is probably the single most important factor influencing both program utilization and employee acceptance.     

The impact of Sunday shopping on employment and hours of work in the retail industry: Evidence from Canada

Between 1980 and 1998 every Canadian province passed legislation that in some way relaxed restrictions on Sunday shopping. This study exploits the variation in deregulation dates between provinces to identify how retail employers adjust employment and hours of work when deciding to open on Sundays. A major complication of this analysis is to first determine for which provinces the deregulation dates are useful indicators of increases in Sunday store openings. This paper uses a unique trading-day regression approach to identify these provinces and then uses aggregate data from the selected provinces to estimate a simple dynamic labour demand model that allows employment and hours to be imperfect substitutes in production. The results suggest that retailers’ needs for Sunday labour were disproportionately satisfied through increases in employment levels. Comparison of the estimates at three levels of the retail industry suggests that the employment and hours gains were larger among general merchandise stores than among more specialized retail establishments and relatively modest at the aggregate retail industry level. In addition, despite evidence of an immediate shortfall in the employment level below the long-run optimal level, the results suggest that firms were unable to compensate by temporarily increasing the hours of their existing employees.     

Human Capital Formation and the Decision Makers

Recent empirical work has identified the existence of cultural filters — demographically non-neutral processes whereby employers differentially screen applicants to evaluative attributes and characteristics - and analyzed how they affect differential employment success rates and wage levels. Women are filtered differently than men, and the outcome is disproportionately lower levels of employment and wages. The analysis explores the proposition that, for women to obtain long-term employment at reasonable wages, alternative strategies for workforce participation should be developed at the regional level to better match needs of employers - and the way they filter applicants for those needs, through investment in the target population.     

401(k) matching contributions in company stock: Costs and benefits for firms and workers

This paper tests for important determinants of why some employers provide matching contributions for 401(k) plans in company stock. We find that firms that match in company stock have lower stock price volatility and lower bankruptcy risk and are also more likely to offer a defined benefit plan, consistent with a recognition that imposing a concentrated portfolio can be costly for employees. Evidence also indicates that firms match with company stock to help deter takeovers by putting stock into friendly hands. Simulation results suggest that while portfolio-optimizing employees are made worse off by having their match restricted to company stock, sufficiently risk tolerant employees who follow naïve investment strategies might prefer a 401(k) plan at a company with a company stock match to a plan at a company with an unrestricted match.     

Working Time and the Impact of Policy Institutions: Reforming the Overtime Hours Law and Regulation

This paper analyzes implications for worker well-being if legislation in the U.S. Congress is passed permitting employers and non-supervisory employees who agree to substitute future compensatory time off in lieu of premium pay for overtime work, calculated over an 80-hour two-week standard. The impact on worker welfare is predicted applying augmented worker utility and employer demand for hours functions. Plausible inter-temporal scenarios suggest that unless workers gain more control over the timing of their overtime and comp time hours, they are likely to experience a net loss in welfare. This will occur to the extent employers use the new overtime regulation to vary work hours and schedules more closely with fluctuations in output demand as opposed to better customizing work hours to fit workers' needs to balance work with competing demands on their time, that is, adopting a short rather than longer-run time horizon regarding the restraint of labor costs. Alternative policies are more likely to raise welfare.     

Medical coverage for local national employees in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia

Employers that must provide medical benefits for employees in Russia and other Eastern European countries cannot try to match the coverage they provide in the United States. This article, which focuses on the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia, summarizes the medical benefits provided by each government's social security system, describes other means of accessing medical care in these countries and outlines the insured supplemental benefit plans that may be available to employers in the local market.     

WHAT ARE EMPLOYERS DOING TO CREATE A COMPETITIVE MARKET FOR HEALTH CARE IN THE TWIN CITIES?

Employers' willingness to control costs is a critical aspect of pro-competition strategies for the health-care market. Here, we present some of the first quantitative evidence of what employers do to control health-care costs. Our sample is 44 large private and public employers in Minnesota.
We develop a theoretical model in which the employer chooses cost-control "innovations"—along with wages, fringe benefits, and labor-force size—to maximize profits. The role of innovations is to reduce unit costs of offering fringe benefits.
Our data are from a 1982 survey. Eighty percent of the surveyed employers, representing nearly 200,000 employees, responded. Most respondents offer both indemnity insurance plans and health-maintenance organizations (HMOs). Many firms and individual health-insurance plans conduct cost-control activities, but less than half of the firms which offer HMOs have adopted level-dollar premium contributions for their family health-insurance policies. Few plans have increased their coinsurance and deductible requirements in the past five years.
We use probit equations to estimate the probability that a firm or a health plan will adopt cost-control activities. Our analysis suggests that many firms may soon make major plan-design changes to control health-care costs, although they have not yet done so.