Insurance exchanges are the health-care experiment du jour. Retirees are the test case.
The latest indication: Media-company Time Warner Inc. plans to move its U.S. retirees from company-administered health plans to private exchanges, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company will allocate funds in special accounts that retirees can use to go shop for coverage, the person said.
The news comes as International Business Machines Corp. also plans to move about 110,000 of its own retirees off its company-sponsored health plan to a Medicare insurance exchange.
President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul calls for such exchanges, which will go live next month, and employers are looking at similar, privately administered exchanges as an alternative to offering their own health plans.
Yet while these efforts are just ramping up—and creating a good deal of anxiety in the process—hundreds of thousands of retirees are already using exchanges to pick Medicare plans, and many more are likely to do so in the months ahead as companies look for ways to fix their health-care costs by moving to the "defined contribution" model they adopted for pensions years ago.Read the rest of the story HERE.
Related story linked below:
And So It Begins: IBM to move about 110,000 Retirees Off it's company sponsored Health Plan
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1 comment:
IBM, Time Warner...this is just the beginning and the Baby Boomers who are all retiring now with what they thought were secure benefits from their employers are about to get a BIG and EXPENSIVE wake-up call.
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