Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 5th Edition by Raymond Noe, John Hollenbeck, Barry Gerhart, Patrick Wright

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Aon Hewitt Wants to Help Employers Manage Health Benefits
When companies around the world want help in designing HR programs or a qualified contractor for outsourcing HRM functions, many of them turn to one of the giants in the field, Aon Hewitt. For its part, Aon Hewitt is constantly scanning its business environment, looking for areas in which employers are likely to need more help. An obvious growth area in the United States in recent years is help with the cost of providing employees (and for some employers, retirees) with health insurance.
For the past few decades, the usual approach to providing this employee benefit is for employers to purchase group health insurance plans and enroll full-time employees and their dependents. Some employers offer a choice of several different insurance plans, and some extend coverage to employees after they retire. This benefit is highly valued, but offering it is becoming a burden. The employers in Aon Hewitt's database are beginning to spend more than $10,000 annually per person.
Aon Hewitt sees an opportunity that also plays into employees' desire for flexible benefits packages: the creation of health care exchanges for employers to offer. Aon Hewitt acts as a broker: it arranges for various insurers to make available different insurance plans with different costs and benefit levels. Aon Hewitt sets up an information site where participating employees can see choices arranged by insurance carrier, level of coverage (basic through premium), plan features, and prices. Individuals go to the exchange, review the options, and if they wish, get advice from an exchange employee. Then they select the plan they prefer, paid for with some combination of employer and employee dollars: presumably, the employer would pay up to some set level, and the employee would bear any additional cost. Because the exchange handles the enrollment and billing for the plans, the employer may pay less for administration. Also, employers' HR departments don't have to shop around for the best deals on insurance every year. Aon Hewitt's CEO, Kristi Savacool, sees a parallel with trends in retirement benefits: employers used to offer mainly defined-benefit plans, where the employer invested the funds and later made promised pension payments, but now most have switched to defined-contribution plans controlled largely by the employees themselves.
The firm first introduced the health care exchanges as a retiree benefit. Employers offering health insurance to retirees were enthusiastic, and more than 2.4 million retirees have signed up. As the demand for this service grew, Aon Hewitt decided to make it available for employers to offer their current employees. In spite of the growing costs, most of the large employers served by Aon Hewitt have expressed an intention to continue offering health coverage, so they are extremely interested in ways to do so more economically. Whether or not states create the health insurance exchanges called for under the recent health care reform law, the state exchanges are meant to serve individuals and medium-sized and small businesses, leaving large companies (those with at least 1,000 full-time employees) as a wide-open market for Aon Hewitt's exchanges. Among its current clients, Aon Hewitt expects that nearly half will include its exchange in their benefits packages.
Besides setting up health care exchanges, Aon Hewitt helps set up wellness programs aimed at lowering the need for expensive services. Aon Hewitt's services include designing the programs and preparing communications to employees aimed at promoting healthy behavior.
How could you use information technology (for example, e-HRM and social media) to implement a health insurance exchange at your company?