IBM is dropping the $20 co-payment for employees’ visits to primary care doctors. The Wall Street Journal covers this story today. The “no co-pay” scheme will cover employees enrolled in IBM’s self-insured health plan — excluding workers enrolled in HMOs. Overall, IBM has 115,000 employees and spends $1.3 billion on health care. The WSJ quotes [...]

There’s more evidence that linking patients online to targeted programs that help them manage chronic conditions not only results in better patient outcomes — the process results in lowering costs for care. The DASH for Health program is an online tool that helps health consumers change nutrition and exercise behaviors. A pilot program to test [...]

Small business is the working poor of American industry when it comes to health insurance access: they simply cannot afford to pay for it. This means that workers in small businesses — which is where most new jobs are created — probably won’t have access to health insurance at work. Workers who don’t receive health [...]

Over one-quarter of a million jobs were lost in the U.S. in September 2009. Because unemployment quickly morphs into uninsurance, a question for the 263,000 workers and their families is: “Will Medicaid be able to cover me and my family if I cannot afford COBRA?” There are three pieces of arithmetic that can help us [...]