GAINESVILLE – The sixth annual HealthCare Reform Seminar wasn’t what some people had expected it to be, at least, if you had polled them shortly after the November general election.
Following Donald Trump’s win in the presidential race, and the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives remaining under GOP control, most people, if polled, would have told you that by the end of August, 2017, Obamacare would be a distant memory.
Most people would have agreed that the pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, once accomplished, would usher in a new era of healthcare, and that Thursday’s healthcare seminar, sponsored by the Greater Hall Chamber of Commerce, would include a plethora of new information about the exciting new healthcare program.
But the effort to repeal and replace fizzled.
Congress was unable to agree on what should replace Obamacare, unable to agree in sufficient numbers to change the healthcare mandate, and, according to Brett Fowler of Turner, Wood and Smith Insurance, “ACA remains the law of the land; it’s the current law and you as employers must continue to comply with the provisions that are laid out in the Affordable Care Act.”
That lack of change in healthcare law may have diminished the number of people attending the seminar, roughly 120-people sat attentively in the theater at the Brenau Downtown Center compared to higher numbers in previous years.
Dr. David Miller, Professor and Lead Faculty MBA program, Healthcare Management at Brenau University, put it this way: “Despite unprecedented levels of anticipated change and disruption, whether you like it or not, the ACA remains the law of the land, making it necessary for employers of all sizes to focus on compliance.”
“Compliance” can be costly according to panel member Anne Tyler Hall, Attorney and Principal at Hall Benefits Law: costly to implement and even more costly for failure to implement.
“The (U.S.) Department of Labor alone assessed $777-million in ‘recoveries’ last year: penalties, excise taxes, fines,” Hall said. “We want our clients out of the three-quarters of a billion dollars pool.”
Heather Webb recently began working at Rehabilitative Industries of Northeast Georgia and decided to attend the seminar. She said, “I want to make sure we are in compliance for the DOL (Department of Labor) as I step into this new role.”
Webb said her expertise is in the realm of employee benefits. “Fortunately I’ve moved from a very large company to a very small company, so my interest today is in seeing the differences.”
Featured speaker Dr. John Montgomery, Vice President and Medical Officer for Humana Insurance, spoke on Humana’s (and other major insurance providers) efforts to “change the conversation from ‘Health Insurance’ to ‘Health and Wellness’.”
His argument was simple and statistically driven. “Seventy-five percent of healthcare cost and employee productivity is affected by preventable disease.”
Montgomery lobbied those in the audience to include “wellness” as part of their company’s health coverage program.
Montgomery said, “Ben Franklin coined the phrase ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’. I threw that out years ago. An ounce of prevention in this day and age I would say is worth a ‘ton of cure’.”
Brenau’s Dr. Miller said a video recording of the seminar would be available on Brenau’s YouTube channel sometime in mid-to-late September. He recommended checking their site or visiting the website of the Greater Hall Chamber of Commerce for a hyperlink to the video production once it has been completed.
