In Focus
News & Insight from Chelko Consulting
Embracing a Fiduciary Mindset
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over my long career has been the role an advisor can play in helping health plan sponsors embrace a fiduciary mindset. This means employers taking on the widespread lack of transparency and prevalence of conflicts of interest for the benefit of their employees/plan members.
All too often, plan sponsors assume they have little opportunity to control or reduce their healthcare spend. They accept the status quo and do not challenge brokers who are receiving financial incentives to keep them in poorly managed arrangements with specific insurers. read more…
What About Us?
The recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act includes a series of provisions intended to reduce prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries. Because the bill got through Congress via the budget reconciliation process, it was not allowed to include drug pricing provisions that apply to the commercial market (i.e., employer-sponsored health plans).
So, the law couldn’t do it, but can employers do it on their own? Or maybe the bigger question is: Will they? Worse yet, will this law create a significant cost shift from Medicare to private sector plans? Only time will tell! read more…
Making a Splash!
On an unseasonably warm day in June, we at Chelko cooled off the best way we know how — by splashing into some data. read more…
Is “Buy Local” a Realistic Strategy for Employers?
As you might guess from the title and subtitle of Dave Chase’s popular book Relocalizing Health: The Future of Health Care is Local, Open and Independent, the emphasis on “local” is a key building block for his vision of a more cost-effective health care system. While I support many of the concepts discussed in the book, I remain skeptical when it comes to the localization premise ꟷ at least as it applies to large employers with distributed operations. read more…
Willing to Do the Hard Jobs
A friend of mine is the CEO of a structural engineering company that specializes in maintenance, construction, modifications, inspections, and emergency services within the broadcast industry. Pretty mundane stuff, right? Far from it.
What I failed to mention is that the company’s niche is working on the highest communications towers in the country ― towers that rise as high as 2,000 feet in the air. read more…
Spread the Word
Chelko Enhances Communications Offering via Expanded Partnership
While the Chelko Consulting Group has always provided clients with communications services to support its health and welfare benefits consulting work, a recently expanded partnership with longtime collaborator Workforce Communication has dramatically enhanced the breadth and depth of that offering. read more…
Benefits Benchmarking: Striving for Average?
Most companies and their functional areas tend to passionately pursue best-in-class performance, but do executives send a different signal to their employee benefits teams? read more…
Another Day, Another Shell Game
If you’re a plan sponsor, you’re probably familiar with the drug Humira. That’s undoubtedly because it appears toward the top of your list of costliest drugs. Well, that might change soon. Or maybe not. It’s tough to tell. read more…
Strange Bedfellows: High-Cost Drugs and Peace of Mind
What keeps you awake at night? For a couple years now, we’ve written about the number of mega-expensive new cell and gene therapies in the development pipeline. By “mega,” we generally mean therapies costing more than a million dollars. read more…
“Independence Changes Everything!”
I recently saw this statement in big bold letters on the last page of a report issued by one of our competitors. I agree, independence can be a real game-changer. But what is “independence” in this context? read more…
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