Employers, Be Strategic In Implementing Health Care Reform

The Affordable Care  Act (ACA) is here to stay, commentators all agree. There might be some adjustments at the margin – possibly Congress will eliminate the medical device tax; maybe Congress will permit Flexible Spending Accounts and Health Savings Accounts to be used for over the counter drugs.  But the essentials of the ACA will remain, including the individual and employer mandates.

The purpose of this post is not to detail the many compliance issues that employers must satisfy under the ACA. Suffice it to say that employers of all sizes need to be aware of their obligations in 2013, and the even greater obligations facing them in 2014, when the major provisions of the act become effective. Employers should consult their legal counsel, brokers, and other benefit plan experts to determine what they must do to comply with the ACA.

Instead, this post is intended to provoke employers to think strategically about how they want to structure their health insurance plans for employees.  I recently participated in an Aon Hewitt conference call in which their healthcare experts advised that compliance and corporate strategy are two different things, and employers need to focus on both.

Many corporate leaders deplore the need to be experts in health insurance and plan design issues, because it detracts from their focus on their companies’ products and services to customers. Nevertheless, most executives recognize how important the health and engagement of their workforce is. As they implement the ACA, companies will become more involved in healthcare decisions, not less. Wise employers will deal with the problem strategically.

HR, Finance, and other executives at companies of all sizes should discuss:

• Do we want to build unique health insurance plans designed specifically for our workforce? What are the major healthcare needs of our employees? What employee behaviors are driving our healthcare costs, and how can we incent healthier behavior?
• Do we want to build or join a private healthcare exchange to provide our employees with more  choices? Would we rather push employees into state or federal healthcare exchanges to reduce our involvement in structuring healthcare plans?
• Should we structure our jobs to maximize the number of part-time employees for whom we do not need to provide health insurance? What will the implications be for employee satisfaction and for our operational efficiency?
• How do we segment our health insurance offerings and our communications for various groups within our workforce?

Now that the ACA has survived the Supreme Court and the electoral process, employers must focus on their roles in its implementation. But they shouldn’t ignore their companies’ strategic needs as they do.

Complying with the ACA is one thing. Making the right strategic decisions for your workforce is another. Be sure you do both.

Change the Organization’s Design to Get Different Results; But Be Careful . . . You Will Get What You Design

Many disciplines want to take credit for the adage “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” There are many attributions for this saying, but Susan Carr, writing in the Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare e-newsletter, determined that it originated with Dr. Paul Batalden in the field of medicine.

When Ms. Carr contacted Dr. Batalden about his observation, he told her:

The observation invites personal reflection and awareness, the place where the lasting improvement of quality usually begins. By directing people's attention to design, the words offer a powerful invitation to deeply consider how the present situation was created and invites its re-creation.

Many fields of practice have systems to which this adage applies – the medical field where Dr. Batalden worked, the legal system, and organizational systems.

Because I’ve worked in Human Resources, not medicine, I think of the saying as an organizational design principle: Every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.  How many times have HR directors looked at employees’ behavior and shaken their heads, wondering why people behave the way they do? The answer is often that the organization incents people to behave that way. 

For example, sales employees might be paid for dumping more product in customers’ stores than the customer can profitably sell. Or one manufacturing plant might hoard materials that could better be used in another plant, because they have learned that ordering new materials later takes too long.

Yes, every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets. The only way to change the result is to change the system.

Some organizational systems are formal – the reporting relationships, the incentive plans, the company policies, etc. – and some are informal – the “attaboy” conversations, or the hallway meetings where the real work gets done.

As one leadership commentator said (in The Executive Perspective):

As discussed . . .  here on our blog, you design your company system through the conversations that you are actively having as well as those that you have codified in employee manuals, procedures, plans. However, your design is also stuck in unspoken conversations that you should be having but you are not having. The classic example is of a company that wants to be innovative but does not reward risk taking. 

Once you recognize that, you can now also see that if you want to change your results, and therefore the design of your team or company, you just have to change your conversations.

If you want to change the results, but don’t change the design of your organizational system, you are engaged in Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The changes you make to your organization may be small. In fact, you are probably better off trying small changes, rather than engaging in a wholesale re-design of your organization.

I’ve been a part of change initiatives that take the entire organization apart, task by task, trying to design the perfect organization to get a desired result. The problem with that approach is that organizations are complex. The larger the organization is, the more complex it is.

Most organizations are so complex that the law of unintended consequences takes over. There is no way you can anticipate every interaction between the organization’s members or parts. In dismantling an entire organization to re-structure it, you are as likely to create new dysfunctions as to fix the old problems.

So change. But change carefully.

When has a change caused unintended consequences in your organization?

You Can’t Legislate Love, But Regulation of Romance in the Workplace Is Necessary

“You can’t legislate love,” someone with whom I worked told me once.  We were discussing our company’s policy forbidding a manager from dating or marrying someone who worked in his or her group.

One of the subplots in my forthcoming novel about a business in trouble deals with a potential romance between one of the corporate officers and a woman in another division. They have started dating, then they move into roles where she reports to him.

Love happens. What are co-workers in love supposed to do?

According to a recent article in Workforce Week, entitled Office Romance Policies Can Reduce Risk, 38 percent of respondents to a Career Builder Survey had dated a co-worker, and one-third of them married the co-worker. Once people are out of college and graduate school, the workplace is a great place to find romance.

But still, employers should have policies on workplace romances. Otherwise, the risks of harassment and other problems when love goes bad are too high. I’ve dealt with lovers who turn each other in for theft, with one employee stalking a former paramour, with love triangles (particularly serious when two of the three employees are still married), and with several couples caught in inappropriate situations in offices, conference rooms, and minivans in the parking lot.

At a minimum, office romance policies should require employees to keep their pants and skirts on, except in the restroom.

Beyond that, here are issues for employers to think about when adopting an office romance policy:

1. Forbid managers from entering into a relationship with anyone in their chain of command. The risks of claims of coercion or sexual harassment by the subordinate, or of favoritism by other employees, are too high. If a personal relationship does develop between a manager and subordinate, or if someone a manager is dating is moved into a position that creates a chain of command, require the manager to tell HR or his or her superiors, so they can decide how to handle the situation.
2. Integrate the office romance policy with the employer’s conflict of interest policy (as it pertains to nepotism), so  it is clear that no one makes decisions on the hiring, firing, performance, and/or compensation of a relative or person they are dating.
3. Make it clear that employees must treat other employees with respect at all times. Forbid any harassment, stalking, disparagement, or similar behavior. 
4. Integrate the policy with the employer’s social media policy – it isn’t just conduct at work that should be banned, but also public conduct (including postings on Facebook and the like) that disparages or harasses other employees.
5. Consider whether to ban dating between employees altogether. The problem with a policy that is this broad is that it requires a definition of “dating.”
6. Consider whether to ban “public displays of affecton.” This, too, can be difficult to define.
7. Some employers require “love contracts,” in which employees who are dating acknowledge in writing that the relationship is consensual and re-affirm their awareness of the anti-harassment and non-disparagement policies.
8. Consider whether the office romance policy should apply to dating consultants, customers, vendors, and other people with whom the employer has an ongoing relationship. This aspect, too, should be integrated with the conflict of interest policy.

No, you can’t legislate love, but you can try to minimize the problems that result in the workplace when love goes bad. (Or when love goes good.)

Have you had any experiences where romances in the workplace caused problems?

Three Tips for Crisis Communications

Every day we read in the newspaper about some crisis – a criminal indictment, a business failure, a natural disaster, or foreign unrest.  We react to these events in large part based on how the leaders of the organizations involved communicate with us.

I was part of a crisis communications team at one institution where I worked. We had many procedures and lists in place – how and where we would meet when disaster hit, whom we needed to bring into the loop within our company, and the external parties with whom we would need to communicate about the crisis. 

But we couldn’t develop the communications pieces until the problem occurred.  At that point, we typically muddled along, debating several drafts of talking points and press releases as quickly as we could. It would have helped to have a simple framework for what to include in our communications.

An article from the July 2012 issue of the American Bar Association newsletter, Your ABA, provides that framework.  The article describes three points that all emergency communications should contain. Although it was written for lawyers, this framework is generally applicable to anyone communicating in an emergency.

Here are the three points, along with some commentary on each (the points are from the YourABA article;  the commentary is based on my own experience):

• Show concern.  Almost by definition, in an emergency, someone has been injured or otherwise harmed.  Show concern for their suffering. Remember Bill Clinton’s reputation for "feeling their pain." Worry less about making an admission against your own interest and more about showing empathy. In the early stages of your response, you don’t have to talk about past events that caused the emergency, but you must sympathize with how people are reacting and feeling at the present.
• Show commitment.  People want to know you will stay with them through the crisis. Talk about your future involvement and commitment to see the situation through to resolution. Even if all you know is that you need to investigate further, make the commitment to investigate fully. State clearly that you will work with any governmental authorities that are involved. Go as far as you can, but no further. You don't want to make promises you can't keep.
• Show you will take action. In addition to wanting to know you are with them, people want to know you will make it better. Make it clear that you will take action as a result of what occurred and what is discovered during future investigations. Even if you don’t know whether or what corrective action is necessary, talk about fully reviewing the results of any investigation. Don't agree to specific actions too readily, but agree to what you can. Then, keep communicating as you later do act, to show you followed through on what you said you would do.

And always remember that you must be truthful, and you must communicate in ways that your audience will understand. Also, be as transparent as you can be.

Every crisis is an opportunity to improve your relationship with your stakeholders or detract from it. Often, in an emergency, you find yourself at a low point in the relationship. How you respond will make all the difference for the future.

What would you add to this framework for crisis communications?

Diversity and Development: Cohesion & Comfort v. Stuffing the Pipeline

My law school class more than thirty years ago was only about 20% women; today, most law schools have 50% or more female students. I recall attending a meeting of the Women Law Students Association, and realizing how nice it felt not to worry about gender issues, not to feel like I was “out of place.” I was probably less circumspect in my comments during that discussion than I would have been had I been in the minority as a female.

As a white professional and manager in a corporate setting, I was typically in the majority by race, but I recall two instances when I was the only white in the meeting.

One time was in a meeting to discuss a particular employee’s performance – all but one of the managers in this employee’s chain of command happened to be African American, and that white manager was not at the meeting. I was a white attorney outside the chain of command there to provide legal advice. On that occasion, I recall feeling that my company had “arrived” on the diversity front with this random occurrence of a mostly African American chain of command. But of course, it had taken many senior managers in that division many years of recruiting and development work before this happened.

The other occasion where I was the only white in a meeting was at a session during a Black MBA Convention where I was recruiting. On that occasion, I recall being very conscious of my race, and realizing that that is how most minorities feel most of the time.

Unlike my reticence in my male-dominated law school classes, I felt very free at that Black MBA meeting to voice my opinions.  I wondered, however, whether my outspokenness was due to (1) the maturity I had gained in the twenty or so years since law school, or (2) my “status” as a member of the majority race, whereas in law school I had been of the minority gender. I will probably never know the answer to that, but at least I was self-aware enough to recognize my behavior and to ask myself the question.

I wonder how many white males would have had that same awareness. When I told my husband this story, he had no idea what I was talking about. Although diversity sensitivity and self-reflection are not among his strengths.

The Wharton School of Business published an article on their Knowledge @ Wharton online newsletter on August 29, 2012, entitled “Race, Gender and Careers: Why 'Stuffing the Pipeline' Is Not Enough”. The article describes research by Wharton professor Katherine L. Milkman and Harvard Business School professor Kathleen L. McGinn, which found that placing professionals of one race or gender all in the same work unit led to lower retention of those professionals.

Although there was greater social cohesion in these work groups – like I had found with the Women Law Student Association – the members of the groups perceived they were competing against each other for limited opportunities for advancement. They perceived there were “quotas,”  whether there were or not. In addition, they perceived structural marginalization – the saw their work unit as a “ghetto.

The conclusion of this research:

"Attempts to design employment practices that are blind to the demographics of candidates are likely to succeed only if all candidates perceive and receive equal mentoring, sponsorship, and peer support regardless of their race and gender."

Milkman is quoted in the article as follows:

"Having mentors and role models who look like you is important. But, more interestingly, we see these negative effects associated with being in a work group with lots of competitors for promotion who resemble you demographically."

In other words, it may be helpful to have opportunities in cohesive groups for interaction, but the workplace with its competition and race for advancement needs to be open.

What has your experience been with race and gender in homogenous work groups?

Like Every Function, To Be Strategic, HR Must Bring Expertise to the Table

This week I’ve been thinking about a Harvard Business Review article by J. Craig Mundy entitled “Why HR Still Isn’t a Strategic Partner.” Human Resources professionals have been debating this issue for over 20 years, which Mundy says must mean that HR has been unsuccessful in many organizations in proving our strategic worth.

The article and the hundreds of comments posted in response give a good overview of the debate about whether HR should be a strategic function, and how to get there, from both HR and line management perspectives. Many people have weighed in on what’s good about HR and what’s wrong with HR. Every HR professional, and everyone in business who cares about the effectiveness of HR, should read Mundy’s article and a good sampling of the comments.

Mundy argues that HR professionals should evaluate every action they take based on whether their act creates flow or causes friction in the organization.  He defines “friction” and “flow” as follows:

“Friction is anything that makes it more difficult for people in critical roles to win with the customer. Flow, on the other hand, is doing everything possible to remove barriers and promote better performance.”

In my experience, these definitions – and this focus for HR – are insufficient, because they are too subjective. Who decides what is difficult? Who decides what removes barriers?

HR has the reputation of only being interested in compliance and transactional work and therefore thwarting what the business needs to get done.  Many times this is true, but what happens when non-compliance brings on litigation that threatens the profitability – or even the existence – of the company? Isn’t it “strategic” to recommend compliance that is necessary to keep the organization in business?

People in organizations tend to think of friction as anything that makes it more difficult for them to do what they want, rather than whether it fosters the creation of a good relationship with a valuable customer.  Similarly, they view flow as anything that removes barriers for them, and not necessarily whether it promotes the overall performance of the organization.

Given the parochial interest of most corporate managers, what is HR to do? To be a truly strategic partner, HR must make its own assessment of the best long-term needs of the organization.  Obviously, this cannot be done in a vacuum, and requires consultation with – and even obedience to – the leaders of the organization.

But for HR professionals to be strategic, they cannot allow others to determine the right course of action without bringing their own experience, expertise and influence to bear.

By arguing that HR must bring an independent expertise to the table, I am not disagreeing with Mundy’s point that HR needs to have a business perspective.  To the contrary.  I am saying that HR is no more and no less likely to be taking the business perspective than any other function.  All divisions within the company need to avoid taking parochial positions, and all are prone to it.  All groups need to work together for the benefit of the whole.

The true debate isn’t whether HR is strategic or not, but whether HR brings a valid and valuable perspective on what direction the organization should take, and whether HR has the expertise and capacity to move the organization in the desired direction. It’s the same debate that is needed about every other function in the organization.

In your experience, when has HR been a hindrance, and when has it been a help?

Favorite Firings – Next in the Series: Fired for Donating an Organ

Would you donate a kidney to your brother?

Here’s a recent Missouri case that makes me wonder “what was this employer thinking?” I don't think all terminations resulting from an employee’s medical issue are against public policy. But in most cases, showing a little compassion is the right thing for an employer to do. Managers should think long and hard before firing an employee with a serious medical situation.

The Facts: In Delaney v. Signature Health Care Foundation, No. 97419, 2012 LEXIS 694 (Mo. App. E.D., May 22, 2012), Norton, J., the Missouri Court of Appeals decided that Phyllis Delaney had been wrongfully terminated for taking time off to donate a kidney to her brother.

Ms. Delaney worked for Signature Health Care Foundation as a data entry clerk. When her brother needed a kidney transplant and she was a match to provide him with a kidney, Ms. Delaney told her employer that she would be off work for four weeks. According to Ms. Delaney’s allegations, Signature Health first approved her absence, then changed its mind three days before surgery and fired her.

Missouri is an employment-at-will state, which means that an employer can fire an employee for any reason, or for no reason, but not for an illegal reason. Missouri recognizes a “public policy” exception to the employment-at-will doctrine – an employer may not fire an employee for a reason that is contrary to well-established public policy in the state. Specifically, the Court of Appeals in Delaney said:

“Missouri Courts have recognized four categories of the public policy exception to the at-will-employment doctrine. Specifically, an employee has a cause of action when he or she has been discharged for: (1) refusing to perform an illegal act or an act contrary to a strong mandate of public policy; (2) reporting the employer or fellow employees to superiors or third parties for their violations of law or public policy; (3) acting in a manner public policy would encourage; or (4) filing a claim for worker's compensation. Hughes v. Bodine Aluminum, Inc., 328 S.W.3d 353, 356 (Mo.App.E.D.2010).” 

In her lawsuit, Ms. Delaney claimed that Signature Health had wrongfully terminated her employment in violation of Missouri’s public policy encouraging organ donation. Signature Health won a dismissal of the lawsuit in the lower court, but the Missouri Court of Appeals reversed.

Based on a review of several Missouri statutes, the Court of Appeals held that Missouri public policy does encourage organ donation. Therefore, firing an employee because he or she is an organ donor gives the employee a claim under the public policy exception to Missouri’s employment-at-will doctrine. Ms. Delaney deserves her day in court, according to the Court of Appeals, and she will now have an opportunity to prove that in fact she was discharged because she had decided to donate the kidney to her brother.

The Moral: Before managers decide to fire an employee, they should take a step back and think about how the termination would look to an outsider. I always told managers to ask themselves how the case would look in the newspaper, or if they were telling their mother about the situation. If you don’t want to explain yourself to the public or to your relatives, then the termination is probably not a good idea.

In this case, would any rational manager want to explain that they fired a woman because she was going to give her brother a kidney?

In addition, managers should consider whether there are any statutes or regulations that might support a public policy claim like in the Delaney case. If there is any question, talk to an attorney who specializes in employment law.

Ms. Delaney has not yet won her case. It might be that the employee’s absence in this case would truly cause the employer a hardship, and the employer might be able to prove that public policy does not require them to endure the hardship to support her organ donation. But Signature Health had better be able to prove some defense that overcomes the policy in favor of organ donation at trial. Could they not have hired a temporary data entry clerk for the work that Ms. Delaney would miss for four weeks?

In my opinion, they are facing an uphill battle in the court of law and in the court of public opinion. What do you think about this situation?

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I’m still soliciting ideas for stories on workplace terminations to publish. If you have an interesting situation, please email me or leave a comment below. But please disguise the facts to protect the innocent (and not-so-innocent) unless the situation is well-publicized, and then include a link to support your story. I will only publish verified stories.

Key Issues to Consider in Succession Planning

The novel I am writing centers on a family-owned business in which the CEO is suddenly injured and unavailable. He had not developed a succession plan for himself prior to becoming incapacitated.  And the business depended on him to resolve the conflicts between his warring staff members.

I’m sure the existence of conflicts between members of a CEO’s staff doesn’t surprise anyone who has worked in any corporate culture for more than a few months. What would happen in your organization if the person responsible for resolving disputes and making decisions were suddenly unavailable?

Conflict management is only one reason for a good succession plan. Succession planning is essential for insuring the continuation of the enterprise – making sure that the right people are ready for critical positions at the right time.

Here are some questions to answer as you consider the succession plan in your organization:

• What are your organization’s strategic goals for the future? How will your workforce need to change to get you there?
• Have you identified the key positions in your company for today and for the foreseeable future? (Needs may change, and your succession plan should anticipate future organizational needs.)
• Have you identified the competencies future leaders will need to have? (What educational, technical, and leadership skills and attributes will be important five years from now?)
• What training and developmental activities will your current staff need to ready them for the leadership roles of the future?
• How will you transition from your current organization to the structure and roles you envision down the road?
• While succession planning is necessary at the top of the organization, how far down should your plan go? Often there are critical technical positions that should be considered as well.

HR and key line officers should discuss these succession issues regularly, and keep the succession plan evolving. Otherwise, your organization will end up as dysfunctional as the company I describe in my novel.

Law Firm Management: An Oxymoron?

I’ve seen the workings of several law firms over the past thirty years, either through my own experience or that of friends and relatives. In most cases, law firm management is an oxymoron.

Everyone is dissatisfied – support staff, new lawyers, senior associates, junior partners, rainmakers, and senior counsel. While dissatisfaction is rampant in any work environment, lawyers tend not to understand management and even to scoff at its importance. Except when it comes to billing and collections.

There are some law firms on the 100 Best Places to Work lists, but they usually make these lists because of the perks they offer – such as working from home or on-site day care – that don’t require strong people management skills.

Here are some of the horror stories I’ve heard in recent years:

• Firms tell new law school graduates they will have jobs, but don't give the new attorneys any idea when their start date will be.  The prospective associates then fret over whether to commit to another job, and wonder whether they will be able to make the transition when the firm is ready for them. Firms are also slow to inform new associates about signing bonuses, salary and benefits.
• Managing partners and mentors leave senior associates in the dark about how partnership decisions are made.  In most firms, these decisions are highly subjective. Associates never know who blackballed them, and they might linger in limbo for years, thinking next year they’ll grab the golden ring for sure.
• Attorneys at all levels treat support staff as drudges, subject to verbal abuse and unreasonable deadlines. No judge would put up with this behavior from attorneys in the courtroom, but lawyers feel free to scream at their secretaries and paralegals in the office.
• The management committee sets partners’ compensation in secrecy, on the theory that if nobody knows what anybody else makes, no one will be jealous. But somehow the information gets out, or the speculation is worse than the truth. 
• Partners don't know whether they are truly “partners” under the law, or “employees” of a corporation. The firm's deductions from partner compensation may not match how the firm is structured on paper or how it operates in practice. Partners and employees have different rights under the law -- many employment laws, such as Title VII and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, don't protect partners, yet how many partners in today’s mega-firms truly influence the firm as owners?
• Senior attorneys feel shunted aside after thirty years or more of contributions to the firm. Many firms have no graceful way to ease an attorney’s route to retirement. Some old lawyers shuffle in to empty offices to read their mail; others leave disgruntled taking decades of experience that could help new lawyers in the firm.
• Even the partners with large books of business who bring in the most income to the firm feel under-appreciated. Firms don't know how to balance recognition of the relationships that brought in the clients and the work that keeps them.
• And even the firms’ Employment Practices groups treat employees poorly. You’d think this group would know to avoid sexual harassment, but unfortunately, harassers seem to be spread equally across the workforce.

Legal conferences these days are full of sessions about “practice management” and “project management.” But law firms would do better to add “people management” to their vocabulary and legal education programs.  Unfortunately, lawyers seem to think they are too smart for that “people stuff.”

Large firms usually have HR departments, but HR gets no more respect than the secretaries. When an employee problem develops, the attorneys have no patience, and ask HR to “deal with it,” meaning “Get rid of the person. Yesterday.”

Certainly not all firms fit the picture I’ve created. But many do. Do you recognize your firm in one or more points of what I’ve described? If so, what are you doing about it?

My Varied Perspectives on Health Care Reform

This past week’s Supreme Court arguments over the Affordable Care Act fascinated me – as an attorney, as a conservative, as a former benefitplan administrator, and as a corporate executive.

1.      Limits on the Commerce Clause

As an attorney, I was fascinated by the discussion on the limits of the Commerce Clause. In two years, we’ve moved from Nancy Pelosi asking “Are you kidding me?” when a reporter questioned whether the ACA was constitutional to a very serious debate in the Supreme Court over whether the federal government can require its citizens to purchase a product from private insurers.

As a conservative, I want to limit the intrusion of government – particularly the federal government – in the lives of Americans. The Constitution enumerates certain powers for the federal government, and reserves all other powers for the states or for individuals. Where are the limits of the Commerce Clause? We should find out something in June.

2.      The Desirability of Uniform Benefit Plans

However, much as I would prefer to see limits on what the government requires of its citizens, as a former administrator of health and pension plans for a corporation with employees in all fifty states, I recognize that uniformity makes plan administration much simpler.

Using the states as a testing lab for different healthcare reform options – as Republicans have been arguing – complicates plan administration significantly. The Employee Retirement and Income Security Act (ERISA) has a strong preemption clause, which permits companies that self-insure to develop national benefit programs. As a plan administrator, I appreciated ERISA’s preemption clause.

By contrast, companies that have a fully insured product must meet a variety of state mandates and other insurance regulations. Most businesses that have fully insured health plans have very little ability to opt out of state requirements they don’t like or think are too expensive, such as infertility treatments or organ transplants.

One thing to watch as the Department of Health & Human Services issues regulations under ACA is how onerous the requirements will be on all health insurance plans. We’ve seen one situation recently – the inclusion of birth control and abortificants as mandated preventative health care for women. The more treatments that are mandated under ACA, the more expensive health care insurance will be for all of us.

Uniformity is nice, but so is the ability to choose a plan that makes the most sense for the individual.

3.     De-Linking Health Care from Employment

As a conservative and a benefit plan administrator, I would prefer that health insurance not be associated with employment. Obviously, that would have eliminated the Benefits Department where I worked for a portion of my career, but it would have permitted my company to focus its attention more on the needs of the business and less on the rising cost of employee benefits. When the CFOs of companies spend as much time on tweaking their employee health care plans as on financing product and equipment improvements, something is wrong.

On the other hand, I recognize that a major reason that the health care system works today is that employers subsidize their workers’ health insurance. Employers get away with offering the same price to everyone – one of the requirements the ACA attempts to impose – because they subsidize the cost.

Younger employees are willing to buy into employee health insurance plans because of the subsidy which makes it worth their while (and, of course, older employees get an even better deal). In smaller businesses and non-profit employers, which cannot subsidize their employees’ costs to the same extent that large businesses can, employees are less likely to buy into insurance at work. They get coverage through a spouse’s employer or they do without health insurance.

4.     It’s Not Over till It’s Over

So what will the Supreme Court do? What will Congress do after the Supreme Court decision, whichever way it lands?

No matter what, there have been too many questions raised about the Affordable Care Act in the last two years. The 2,700 pages enacted in March 2010 will not remain intact.

What are your predictions?

Favorite Firings – First in a Series

Mitt Romney has taken a lot of heat in the last several weeks for saying he likes to fire people.  Some of his Republican primary opponents misinterpreted what he said, but Romney’s intent was clear:  He wants to be able to fire his health insurance company, if he isn’t happy with its service, just as he would fire any service-provider.

I don’t want to give the impression that firing is fun, any more than Romney did. Terminating someone’s employment is one of the most difficult tasks of management, as any good manager knows.  But sometimes firing an employee is the right action for the company, the department, and often even for the employee.

I’d like this to be the first in a series of occasional posts on “favorite firings” – stories about employee terminations that make you shake your head and wonder about the state of our workforce.

My purpose is to make you chuckle, but also to make you think.  Was termination the right thing to do in each situation?

Here is one of my “favorite firings”:

The Facts:  An employee claimed he had been injured at work, and he filed a worker’s compensation claim.  His doctor imposed lifting restrictions prohibiting him from lifting more than twenty pounds, which kept him from doing his job as a stock handler. Therefore, he was off work on disability leave.

Some of the man’s co-workers noticed his picture in the local newspaper, depicting him carrying a wild turkey – holding the dead bird out with one hand, his shotgun in the other hand, and a big grin on his face.  He had won the local turkey shoot competition, and the newspaper prominently reported the weight of his bird as thirty pounds – more than his lifting restriction. 

So, yes, this man was fired for lifting a turkey.

The Moral:  An employee’s behavior away from work can lead to serious workplace consequences.  More and more employees are disciplined, fired or refused employment because of Facebook or other social media postings and pictures, or other publication of their non-work actions.

It is unlawful for an employer to fire someone for filing a worker’s compensation claim.  But an employer can take action if the employee lies about his restrictions.

If you don’t want your employer to find out about something you’re doing, don’t let it be publicized anywhere.  Even if you won the turkey shoot.

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If you have any ideas for stories of “favorite firings” to publish, please email me or leave a comment below.  But please disguise the facts to protect the innocent (and not-so-innocent) unless the situation is well-publicized, and then include a link to support your story.  Only verified stories will be published.