Towers Watson Acquires Liazon to Expand Private Benefit Exchange Offerings Through Multiple Channels

Transaction complements Towers Watson’s OneExchange with scalable, flexible solution

NEW YORK, November 22, 2013 — Towers Watson (NYSE, NASDAQ: TW), a global professional services company, announced today that it has acquired Liazon Corporation, a leader in developing and delivering private benefit exchanges for active employees. The acquisition, which follows the purchase of Extend Health in June 2012, solidifies Towers Watson’s strength in the private exchange market through its OneExchange solution. Going forward, Towers Watson will continue to enhance Liazon’s award-winning private exchange solution and serve the needs of Liazon’s leading broker, consultant and carrier partners, some of which offer the Liazon product under their own brands.

Read the full announcement.

State Health Insurance Exchange Decisions: Practical, Not Political

Click to listen in to a discussion I had with Dan Gorenstein and others on state exchanges

On December 6th, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie vetoed a bill that would have created a health insurance exchange for his state under President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform law. Leading up to the states’ December 14 deadline to declare whether they would run their own exchange, many have interpreted state decisions to operate their own exchanges – or not to – along political lines.

I talk about state exchanges with Dan Gorenstien in his Marketplace piece, “States must make health care decisions,” and with Alex Wayne in his Bloomberg.com article, “Insurers Face Jumbled Market With Health Exchange Rules.” But the decisions we are seeing now are much less political, than practical. Here’s why.

First, health insurance exchanges are the law of the land based on last summer’s Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or ACA) and cemented by President Obama’s re-election. There will be no repeal of Obamacare. That political window has now closed.

Second, under ACA, a state can choose to have the federal government run its health insurance exchange either on an interim basis or indefinitely. So residents of New Jersey, Tennessee and other states that are leaving it to the Feds will have access to individual health plans on January 1, 2014 through a health insurance exchange. They will be covered.

Here’s why the move is practical. I know from running the nation’s largest private Medicare exchange for the last eight years that building an effective exchange does not happen overnight. It is time consuming and costly, with many moving parts.

There is the underlying technology and the crucial relationships with the health insurers that will offer plans in the exchange. There is the initial consumer outreach, education and support while consumers are evaluating and choosing plans and enrolling. There are the complex eligibility requirements that some individuals must meet to receive federal subsidies. Lastly, there is the reality that the newly insured will move between company, Medicaid and individual coverage at frequencies never before seen or managed.

Not knowing the details of what it will take to build and run an exchange or how much it will cost, Christie, Haslam and others feel it’s best to let the federal government run it for now. And they can revisit the decision in the future.

This makes practical sense. The states that will run their own exchanges from day one have been working on them for more than a year. For example, California was the first state to declare that it would run its own and appears to be further along than any other.

For New Jersey and others, at this time, it is the right move. That could change next year as more information about the success of the first state exchanges becomes known to the governor and state legislative leaders.

Governor Christie is right: This is a practical – not political – move.

Read more

• States must make health care decisions, Marketplace
• Insurers Face Jumbled Market With Health Exchange Rules, Bloomberg
• Map: Is Your State Building A Health Exchange?, Kaiser Health News and PBS Newshour

For regular commentary on developments and trends in health care, technology and insurance, follow @brycewatch and @ExtendHealth on Twitter and check out www.extendhealth.com.

On the need for bundled payments in Medicare

Three highly qualified experts wrote this thoughtful post for the Health Affairs Blog, examining how the recurring brinksmanship attending the SGR “doc fix” distracts from a larger discussion that needs to happen around how to save money on Medicare in the coming decades.

Such a discussion must begin with the recognition that the purpose of the Medicare system is not to save money.  If our goal was to spend less, we could abolish the system and spend nothing.   The goal of Medicare is to provide protection for elderly Americans against the financial risk associated with illness, and in the process provide beneficiaries with access to high quality care.  Our challenge is to accomplish those goals in a fiscally sustainable manner.

The three authors, (Michael Chernew, PhD, Professor of Health Care Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; Darius Lakdawalla,  Director of Research at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at USC; and Dana Goldman, holder of the RAND Chair in Health Economics and Director of Health Economics at RAND) have written a cogent and thought-provoking argument for the economic necessity of bundled payment systems in Medicare.

What employers should be doing to lower health care costs

My latest Fast Company blog post here. A new Kaiser study shows that health care premiums are skyrocketing, but as new provisions of health care reform come into effect, companies can do a lot to make their employees healthier for less money.

Related articles

• How Employers Plan to Deal With Health Care Reform (extendhealth.wordpress.com)
• Cost of Health Care Premiums Spike in 2011 (extendhealth.wordpress.com)
• Study: Employers’ Health Care Costs Up 9 Percent (npr.org)
• Health insurance costs soar, study says: Will trend last? (cbsnews.com)

Visit Extend Health — the nation’s largest private Medicare exchange.

More options for employer health care benefits

Yesterday I spoke with Emily Chasen, writer for the Wall Street Journal CFO journal, and today she published this piece about the future of private exchanges as a mechanism for providing health care benefits to active employees. You must be a subscriber to see the whole story, but here’s a snip:

“…a corporate exchange could be a middle ground between keeping a group plan and leaving employees to  use the state exchanges. Regulations that would affect corporate exchanges are still being written, so most companies will probably want to wait for the new laws to take effect in 2014 before deciding whether to use them….According to Bryce Williams, CEO of health-care exchange operator Extend Health, such corporate exchanges could offer companies an alternative to buying group plans from a health insurer.”

Visit Extend Health — the nation’s largest private Medicare exchange.

Will Americans Buy Health Insurance Without A Mandate?

Earlier this year, I wrote an article for InsuranceNewsNet offering my opinion that the individual mandate provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is not essential to achieving the law’s goal of ensuring that tens of millions more Americans have health care coverage.  The individual mandate provision requires all citizens to obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a fine.

In the past 30 days, court rulings on both sides of the question of whether the individual mandate provision is constitutional makes it even more likely that the U.S. Supreme Court will review the matter sooner rather than later.

The unconstitutionally of the individual mandate has become the central argument of opponents in legal challenges to the entire law. They argue that if such a key provision is ruled unconstitutional, the entire law should be unconstitutional. It also remains unpopular with average Americans. In a new poll out last week from the Associated Press and National Constitution Center, 82% of respondents said “no” when asked, “Do you think the Federal Government should have the power to require all Americans to buy health insurance, and to pay a fine if they don’t?”

We’ll have to wait and see how the U.S. Supreme Court rules to know the fate of the provision. But my own opinion hasn’t changed. Based on our experience at Extend Health, if a health insurer offers seniors a private Medicare plan that meets their needs at a price they can afford, they will buy. This is because certain conditions for Medicare-eligible seniors exist that do not exist for all Americans. Most important, Medicare is guaranteed issue and requires standard plan designs.

Guaranteed issue means seniors cannot be denied coverage because of their health status. Standard plan design makes it possible to compare and contrast different plans from different carriers more easily. And these are exactly the conditions all uninsured Americans will experience under PPACA starting in 2014.

While I still believe that these conditions are necessary for large numbers of uninsured Americans to buy health plans without a mandate, today I would also argue they are not sufficient. In addition, the key stakeholders driving the extension of health care coverage to more Americans will need effective outreach programs to ensure that all Americans know their options, understand their eligibility for the federal subsidies that will be offered, and know where and how to purchase health plans.

A large group of these stakeholders – health insurers, health care providers, associations and health care nonprofits – took a major step in the right direction last week when they launched a nonprofit coalition with the mission of ensuring that “all Americans are enrolled in and retain health coverage.” Enroll America  will do this by working to ensure that enrollment processes are simple and streamlined and that people know where they can go to find the right information at the right time.

It’s too early to tell whether Enroll America will be successful. But the importance of its mission cannot be underestimated. While the ACA lays the foundation for insuring tens of millions more Americans with guaranteed issue and standard plan design, finishing the job will require that every American understand what’s coming, and what they can do and when.

Visit Extend Health — the nation’s largest private Medicare exchange.