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Breaking Down Health Reform’s Grandfather Clause

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New Rules May Hamstring Employers’ Ability to Innovate Existing Plans…

The grandfather clause is a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that seeks to keep a key promise made by the Obama administration: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” But interim final rules handed down by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other federal agencies June 17, 2010, appear likely to frustrate the intent of the law and hamstring employers’ ability to offer the best coverage options in a cost-effective manner. In adopting an overly restrictive interpretation of the grandfather clause, the rules essentially diminish employer flexibility to make plan design changes by tying allowable changes to current plan structures.

A new report by the Healthcare Performance Management Institute examines the grandfather clause, the new HHS rules that will govern its implementation and the likely impact on employer health plans. The report also addresses factors organizations should consider when deciding whether or not the benefit of retaining grandfather status outweighs making certain plan design changes.

Click here to download a complimentary copy of this Healthcare Performance Management Institute report.

Want to learn more?

Listen to our recent StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast interview with George Pantos, Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute during which we discuss how companies can keep their current health plans in light of the recently passed healthcare legislation and under what circumstances they may wish to do so.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:57 — 27.4MB)

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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 47 – An Interview with Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 47 – An Interview with Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance explores how to effectively managing business change by overcoming the three common change objections and better engaging the workforce in not only making the change but in sustaining the results. During our discussion, Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of All Changes Still Fail – and What You Can Do About It, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • why companies experience such a high change management failure rate
  • why people resist change
  • whether resistance has to occur with every change or whether it can be avoided
  • the key phases of the change management cycle
  • when change management activities should be started
  • the most damaging change management mistake leaders make and how to avoid it
  • what leaders should do to improve their change management effectiveness

Additional Information

In addition to the outstanding insights Rick shares in Beyond the Wall of Resistance and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from his websites, www.RickMaurer.com and www.ChangeManagementNews.com.   Rick’s book, Beyond the Wall of Resistance, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Author

Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance, is a renowned change management expert, speaker, and bestselling author. He is an advisor to business leaders from a variety of organizations throughout the world, including major Fortune 500 companies, as well as private and nonprofit institutions in industries such as aerospace, healthcare, government, professional associations, telecommunications, and finance. Rick’s opinion has been sought by The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Investor’s Business Daily, Fortune, USA Today, and The Economist. To read Rick’s complete biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:13 — 58.0MB)

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“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 2 of 2

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Lose control of your marketing messages. A Grateful Dead concert was about having fun, meeting friends, checking out great music, escaping the everyday, belonging. Each person defined the experience a little differently, and the group defined the whole. There were interesting subgroups wandering along as part of the larger odyssey that was the Grateful Dead experience.

In building a community, the Grateful Dead were willing to give up a large degree of control over how they were defined and instead hand it to their fans. While this approach is highly unusual, it is also often very successful. When organizations insist on operating in a command-and-control environment with mission statements, boilerplate descriptions, messaging processes, and PR campaigns, their strategies can both hamper growth and backfire in execution.

Let your community define you, rather than trying to dictate what’s said – and how – about your company. When you let others define and talk about you, it is more likely that a community will develop.

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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.

Management and Leadership Best Practice 3 – Demonstrating Commitment

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Buy-in, engagement, support… terms used to suggest commitment to a particular course of action, but are they really? What is true commitment?

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective – Managing Health Insurance Plans

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StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcasts examine the unnecessary marketplace uncertainty created by today’s headline events and the actions business leaders should take to ensure their organizations succeed under these circumstances.

In Managing Health Insurance Plans, we are joined by George Pantos, Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute. George shares his thoughts on how companies can keep their current health plans in light of the recently passed healthcare legislation and under what circumstances they may wish to do so, including:

  • under what circumstances company leaders would want to keep their organization’s existing health insurance plans
  • what leaders must do to have their organization’s current health insurance plans grandfathered
  • what a Healthcare Performance Management program is and how it can help companies keep their current healthcare insurance plans
  • the costs and benefits associated with implementing a Healthcare Performance management program
  • why some executives may want to eliminate their organization’s health insurance program altogether

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable insights George shares in this StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast are the resources accessible from his website, www.HPMInstitute.org.   George can be reached at [email protected].

Final Request…

StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective PodcastThe strength in our community grows with the additional insights brought by our expanding member base. Please consider rating us and sharing your perspectives regarding the StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast on iTunes by clicking here. Sharing your thoughts improves our ranking and helps us attract new listeners which, in turn, helps us grow our community.

Thank you again for listening to the StrategyDriven Editorial Perspective podcast!

About the Author

George Pantos is Executive Director of the Healthcare Performance Management Institute, a research and education organization dedicated to promoting the use of business technology and management principles that deliver better and more cost-effective healthcare benefits for employers who provide health insurance coverage for employees and their dependents. To read George’s full biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:57 — 27.4MB)

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