“Across the country, businesses already strapped by the economy to turn a profit are sacrificing or scaling back employee health insurance plans because of their escalating costs,” The Associated Press reports.

Some stark statistics shed light on the problem.

• Small business pays 18% more than the largest firms for comparable insurance
• Many small businesses are facing double-digit rate hikes (10-15% in Ohio)
• According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 46% of businesses with 3-9 employees offer health insurance, down from 58% in 2002

Read more here…

AccuQuote, a leader in providing term life insurance quotes, leverages blogs, online videos, podcasts, and tweets to generate leads and revenue.

In the video below, the company’s VP of marketing and business development, Sean Cheyney, offers examples of how the company uses social medial and measures success.

The following are some key takeaways:

• Life Insurance Education – Give something of value to the community, try to avoid posts that contain a “call to action” message
• Recruiting – Use social media to recruit and connect, save money over traditional channels
• Strategic Partnerships – Use social media to drive strategic partnerships, use an integrated approach
• PR – Use Twitter, follow reporters that typically cover the company and industry and allow them to follow you
• Tools – Use tools like TweetDeck and Twitter Search to help manage your social media efforts. Applications like SiteCatalyst from Omniture help track and measure success.

Social Media for the Analytic Marketer, by Sean Cheyney; presented by GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council from GasPedal on Vimeo.

Additional interesting information:

• The company has been blogging for 4-5 years
• Company bloggers currently post 5-7 educational articles each week
• The CEO contributes several posts each week
• An estimated 2% of all leads are a result of organic traffic because of their blogging efforts
• Within 1.5 years of the blog’s launch, leads resulted in mid-six figures in revenue

According to an Associated Press article by Christopher S. Rugaber, job openings are at rock-bottom levels.

Overall, it’s an extremely difficult time to be unemployed.

Pockets of demand existing in information technology and sales but on average, 6.1 unemployed workers compete for each job opening, a Labor Department report shows. That’s up from 1.7 workers per opening back in December 2007.

Read the AP article…

Asking for help is a good thing, especially in the workplace where the stakes can sometimes be high.

Jodi Glickman Brown offers tips on how to ask for help the right way. Tip #1: Do your homework first. Start with what you know.

She has two more tips here…

Marc Benioff’s new book describes how he took Salesforce.com from idea to $1 billion in less than a decade.

Now, in an interview with BusinessWeek,  he provides seven tips on how to shape and articulate your vision.

Read the interview here…

An interesting question on health insurance mandates – Does the U.S. Constitution allow the government to require uninsured Americans to buy medical insurance or impose a tax penalty if they refuse?

Both the House and Senate health bills would mandate the purchase of health insurance to help subsidize the program and offset the cost of adverse selection.

Does Congress have the authority?

Read more here…

(May 11, 2009 - Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Europe)

Individual mandates would help offset the costs associated with adverse selection.

In health insurance, adverse selection is the tendency of poorer risks to want insurance more often that standard risks (i.e. sick individuals are more likely than healthy to seek out insurance coverage.)

Under a purely voluntary system, most healthy individuals would likely not choose to obtain coverage.  The individuals most likely to enroll (subsidized insurance or otherwise) would be those who are older and/or who are less healthy than average.  People value insurance more if they plan or expect to use it, and are more likely to participate.

Without mandates, adverse selection would most certainly drive up costs for insurers and as a result, premiums would rise sharply.

Individual mandates are an attempt to offset some of the costs associated with adverse selection.

Read more here:

Do Individual Mandates Matter?

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, average family premiums have gone from$6,438 in 2000 to $13,375 in 2009.

In 2008, Ohio employee premium contribution for family coverage was 23 percent or $2,916, leaving the employer with a $9,764 premium bill.

Source: The Kaiser Family Foundation

Where are costs going? According to a Kaiser Family Foundation projection, average premiums for family coverage could range from $24,180 to $30,803 by 2019.

Note: Health insurance premiums projected for 2010-2019 assuming (1) that the average growth in premiums between 1999 and 2009 (8.7%) continues or (2) that the average growth in premiums between 2004 and 2009 (6.1%) continues. Source: Kaiser Family Foundations projections based on data from Kaiser/HRET Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits, 1999-2009.

Taken from “Pulling it Together”: Simple Arithmetic – The Kaiser Foundation

Local businesses have been suffering during this recession, but consumers still want to support their neighborhood shops.

Here are three ways for small retailers to showcase their local roots and boost local economies at the same time.

Read more here…

The Kaiser Family Foundation has a website that allows an interactive, side-by-side comparison of the major health care reform proposals currently under consideration. The comparison includes a breakdown of all the key characteristics and plan components including, but not limited to the following.

• Employer and Individual Mandates
• Benefit design
• Financing

Visit the site to run your own comparison.