When considering using a PEO is bigger always better? Think about it. Our clients are always telling me they appreciate the personal service we give them. I received an email from a client this week complimenting our staff for always making him feel important when he calls or comes in the office. We do personal New Employee Orientations for our clients in Denver and Colorado Springs right on-site. And I am very proud to talk about the education and certifications held by our staff. And we’ve invested heavily into our software with our client intranet sites, HR libraries, online timekeeping systems, paperless payrolls, and much more.
On St. Patricks Day I celebrated 30 years in the PEO business. I suspect there are folks who have been around longer than me, but not many. Experience teaches you lots of stuff. We’ve got the stuff of experience and we’re proud of it.
So, we might not be the biggest kid on the block, but we carry a pretty good punch. In a huge Colorado market, we’re doing okay against the big boys. Experience, education, certification, technology and local service combines to bring our clients a great combination to prove that bigger really isn’t better.
Approximately three years ago an Orlando hospital received word that federal inspectors were poking around their personnel files to see if the facility was compliant with equal-opportunity hiring guidelines. What followed was a protracted legal battle that ended recently with a ruling that stated the hospital was “a federal subcontractor because it provides more than $100,000 in healthcare services to active-duty military personnel, retirees and their families through the Tricare program.” No one knows where the $100,000 number came from. The ruling, however, means the hospital, like any other federal contractor, will now have to comply with all federal rules on equal-opportunity hiring, while it also begins to grapple with a flood of new regulation in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
These kinds of compliance rulings, along with the White House’s unwillingness to consider proposals designed to eliminate frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits, make us question the future of where business and medicine is headed. Even proponents of comprehensive reform agree that medical malpractice liability reform should have been addressed in last year’s law. But the tort lawyers prevailed.
In the meantime, employers must be ever vigilant in keeping up with changing laws and rulings. The feds and the states aren’t making doing business any easier.
With healthcare costs climbing even higher during this enrollment session, more employers are adopting a tiered system to pass on the bulk of those costs to their employees by assigning bigger contributions to workers in top salary brackets and offering some relief to workers who make less money. The trend is likely to continue, as employers devise various ways of spreading increased healthcare costs among their staff and balancing that side of the ledger against fewer raises and other compensation. The percentage of workers with coverage in large companies whose premiums vary with their wages climbed to 17 percent in 2010, up from 14 percent two years ago. Also, Americans increasingly are turning to health insurance plans with low premiums and high deductibles to save money in the weak economy, prompting doctors and health experts to worry that consumers may be skipping routine care that could head off serious ailments. Experts are warning that now, when most workers enroll for another year of health benefits, the number of people who opt for high-deductible plans, or are forced into them by their employers, is expected to rise yet again. The potential consequences are serious according to a new study by UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research that found 504,000 out of 3 million Californians with high deductibles held off seeing doctors and specialists and that half cited cost as the primary reason.
Politico (7/20, Brown) reports, “A group of Democratic lawmakers wants to use the immigration reform debate to fix one of the most hotly contested aspects of the healthcare law — provisions that bar immigrants from using new government programs to get coverage,” although this “move by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus would add a contentious new element to an already monumental task — passing a bill that puts 11 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.” GOP members are already saying that the public was misled during the healthcare debate, and that “the president and congressional Democrats are trying to get illegal immigrants into the healthcare system through the back door.”
The AP (7/20, Alonso-Zaldivar) reports, “Abortion foes have won a round in the first test of how President Barack Obama’s healthcare law will be applied to the politically charged issue,” leaving abortion rights proponents saying that “the Obama administration’s restrictions go too far.” Notably, “abortion politics flared up after at least one state — New Mexico — initially decided to allow coverage of elective abortion in a new federally funded program to provide coverage for high-risk uninsured people turned away by private carriers.” As a result, HHS “announced last week the program will not cover abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger — exceptions traditionally allowed under federal law.”
The Washington Times (7/20, Lengell) notes that the question of whether high-risk pools will cover abortions “reignited a politically explosive issue that Republicans and pro-life activists are eager to exploit in the lead-up to the fall midterm elections. Seizing on a Health and Human Services Department announcement last week that states must comply with a White House executive order that prohibits most abortion coverage in government-backed insurance pools, anti-abortion groups and Republicans see more ammunition in their effort to rally pro-life voters to the polls.”
Ohio GOP Lawmakers Urge Governor To Restrict Abortions In High-Risk Pool. The Hill (7/20, Pecquet) reports in its Healthwatch blog, “Ohio’s Republican delegation on Monday wrote to Gov. Ted Strickland (D) urging him to restrict abortion coverage in that state’s high-risk pool created under the healthcare reform law.” Notably, the “signees acknowledge the Obama administration’s declaration last week that the federally funded pools would restrict coverage to rape, incest and cases where the life of the mother is in danger. But in the absence of formal guidance from the federal government, they’re asking the governor to clearly spell out abortion coverage restrictions.”
I was reading in one of Covey’s books the other day about the Law of the Farm – we used to call it the Law of the Harvest. He was talking about planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. Basically, you can’t take shortcuts in life. His reference was to kids who try to get away with taking college courses by skipping classes and cramming just before finals and just getting by. That may work in undergraduate work, but when you get to grad school, it just won’t cut it. Eventually in life you have to pay the price to get the result. I happened to be with my second son, Alex at the time. He just returned from Germany, where he really worked to learn a very tough language in a very tough environment. There were no shortcuts there. I have a great deal of respect for him and he has learned some respect for his old man who learned Japanese some thirty-odd years ago in a similar environment. It wasn’t easy and there were no shortcuts. We both gutted it out. But it taught us some great lessons, and some mutual respect.
Professionally, I’ve had to make some calls lately that have taken me out of my comfort zone, but have brought some great results. We’ve gotten some new clients and built some new relationships as a consequence. We attended a conference in Denver where we had a booth and I asked Alex to come with us and stand in beside me for a long day. We had a blast. It was the first time we had ever done anything like that together. No foreign languages, just him and me, working side by side in dad’s business for the first time. After it was over we went to dinner together and just talked. I think it was a day we will both remember for a long time. A great day with great results. I am very proud of him and I don’t think there is much better than having mutual respect between father and son.
I was talking with my partner about a month ago and listening to him tell me about his son winning a hockey championship at the Pepsi Center. That’s about as great as it gets.
I’m still trying to get a feel for this blogging stuff and I decided to make it more personal. I get asked a lot about how I handle work and family, so I thought I’d write about that. Most of you know that we have eleven children. If you think that the work ends when they leave home, think again. We have two who are married, four in college, two in high school and three in grade school. I got a call from my oldest son last week, who was interviewing for medical school. He was worried and stressed about his interview. We talked for awhile about how he would answer questions about the healthcare debate, how to relax, stuff like that. I told him about a word I learned from George Will – “equipoise.” It is a word he uses to describe baseball players who can be intense and relaxed at the same time. I told him to focus on that. He liked that. The next day he called me and said the interview was “no sweat.” It was as if there was nothing to worry about. Well, I was worried! It seems I was more worried that he was.
He lives in Virginia and is engaged and calls me about once a week. We are close, even though he is 24 years-old. I wonder how I’ve done that sometimes. I am extremely grateful for that relationship and it is a model for my relationships with my other kids. It takes effort and time and I just have to make that effort and take that time. So I make the calls when I can. I call when I’m in the car with a wireless headset, I call at night instead of watching TV, I have a Facebook page that connects to theirs, I try to not be 53 years-old to them. I try to have a mit and a ball ready when they come for a visit so we can have a catch. I just try to make it happen. There’s nothing magic. I fail a lot. But sometimes I connect with them and it’s worth it. I wish I could connect more. I love them so much.
I’m going to write more on this subject because it means so much to me. And I really do get asked about it a lot. Give me your thoughts.
Byron
Pace Airlines, formerly Hooters Air (I’m not making this up) was grounded last month after the arrest of their CEO William Charles Rodgers for failure to pay health insurance premiums on their health plan. The EEOC had filed a discrimination suit on September 23rd and he was arrested the next day by insurance investigators and charged with “willful failure to pay group health insurance premiums.” I guess that’s a law in North Carolina. The suit was brought on behalf of Chau Nguyen, and Asian-American flight attendant fired three years ago after complaining that white workers were the only ones being promoted. Meanwhile, Mr. Rogers was jailed and released on bond. According to news reports, Pace owed about $446,000 in back insurance premiums for nearly 340 workers.
Welcome to Byron’s Blog, your home for news and thoughts on the PEO industry and our brand new website! This is the place I will be putting information that might help turn your growth simplified or maybe the latest on one of my other passions, baseball. Feel free to sign up below. Don’t be afraid, if I can join the blogging age…anyone can…see you soon!
Byron