Lost among the partisan rancor surrounding health-care reform is the fact that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law three years ago.
Open enrollment is mere months away and the first provisions of the ACA take effect on Jan. 1, 2014.
We should be seeing a heightened sense of urgency from both the media and businesses to educate workers about the health-care reform obstacles they face in this rapidly changing landscape. Further evidence suggests it would be useful for companies to explore cost-saving advantages of new options such as private health-care exchanges.
Our experience talking to clients, media and businesses has told us this isn’t happening,
however, and a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation supports our worst fears.
The majority of Americans are as uninformed about health-care reform now as they were the day it was signed into law.
According to the new poll, 57 percent of Americans still do not understand how the ACA will impact them and 48 percent have heard nothing at all about whether their state will run its own public health-care exchange.
The knowledge gap between what the media, business leaders and workers know about health-care reform vs. what they should know is wide and doesn’t appear to be shrinking anytime soon.
Professional services organizations can help fill that space by positioning themselves as expert sources for the media and – by extension – businesses in need of health-care reform advice.
For this year at least, companies don’t have much of an excuse for the delay in communicating their intentions to workers. Most consultants agree that very few large companies will drop employer-sponsored health-care insurance in 2014.
Businesses remain committed to finding ways to shift the health and wellness costs more to employees but don’t want to alienate their top people because of inadequate coverage. That’s the “Catch 22.”
Yet companies only looking ahead to 2015 are missing out on potential cost-savings for 2014 by offering up only the status quo to their workforce.
One solution would be to communicate the cost-savings and employee engagement offered in the private exchange landscape, for instance.
Private exchanges will allow businesses (with more than 100 employees) to stay involved in the health-care process but not have to deal with burdensome administrative oversight.
Early feedback from employees working for companies offering this type of solution has been overwhelmingly positive, and good news for the bottom lines of their employers. Two-thirds of enrollees in one private exchange solution now have a better understanding of how they share insurance costs with their employer.
The problem for internal and external communicators of all stripes right now is these types of stories aren’t making headlines. We know. We understand the challenges. We’re on the front lines every day emphasizing the historic impact of health-care reform to the media. Even though the ACA will impact all our lives and open enrollment starts this fall, many in the media have reacted as if health-care reform and health-care exchanges won’t be an issue until the big provisions take effect on Jan. 1, 2014.
This issue has been a tough sell to reporters, but difficult does not equal impossible. It begins with an effort to educate and start a dialogue. Our persistence and strong relationships with the media have resulted in placements, interviews and coverage for our health-care and professional services client thought leaders in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Washington D.C. and Pittsburgh – one city in particular where we’ve helped inform nearly every print and television outlet on the significance of health-care reform and exchange options.
The window is closing for companies to communicate what the ACA has in store for workers in 2014. In addition, consultants and other businesses that hang their hats on providing health-care reform guidance are missing out on a chance to position themselves as ACA authorities to companies and media outlets still thirsting for knowledge on the subject.
Look to us for help. We can situate a professional services organization as an oasis of knowledge amid the desert of health-care reform ignorance.
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Jeremy Church is an account supervisor for WordWrite Communications.
He can be reached at jeremy.church@wordwritepr.com and on Twitter @churchjeremy.
