By now you should have received my note concerning Open Enrollment for our benefits plans, which will begin next week. As I've said in previous postings, this was a particularly difficult year to be negotiating over benefits costs, and I think our Benefits team really did a terrific job with favorable results.  Obviously, the change from one health insurer to another can be disruptive, but we have done a great deal to minimize the inconvenience for the vast majority of our staff.  And the change from one provider to another was literally worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, so well worth the challenge.

We also listened to staff needs.  A number of people posted comments on this blog or sent me notes about moving from Single and Family coverage to a three tier system reflecting Single, Employee plus One, and Family coverage.  And so, with help from our consultants, we were able to re-engineer the way we divvy up employee premium costs to accomodate that change.  I know that will be helpful to many of our employees, with an offsetting reasonable cost increase to those who are insuring families.  For the future, that change will make our premium rates more competitive in the marketplace.

But the unrelenting increase in overall healthcare costs, plus our own claims experience over the past few years which has not been favorable, means that the cost of receiving healthcare will continue to increase for almost everyone.  Going to the doctor will cost more--which doesn't mean you shouldn't go, but it does mean that preventive care and living a more healthy lifestyle becomes even more important

Because of our move to Cigna and other changes in the benefits package, I urge you to attend one of the information sessions which will be held in all of our offices around the US.  Don't just assume that you can rollover whatever you did this year into next year--there are new and important choices to be made, and no one but you can make those decisions.

If you have specific questions, you should probably hold them for the information sessions and ask our benefits professionals.  But if you have comments on the overall process, feel free to post them below.