{"product_id":"cracking-health-costs-isbn-9781118636480","title":"Cracking Health Costs","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e reveals the best ways for companies and small businesses to fight back, right now, against rising health care costs. This book proposes multiple, practical steps that you can take to control costs and increase the effectiveness of the health benefit.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe book is all about rolling back health care costs to save companies and employees money. Working hand-in-hand with their employees, businesses need to ensure that, whenever feasible, employees with the most expensive diagnoses get optimal treatment at hospitals not practicing “volume-driven” medicine for higher profits. Less than 10% of employees incur 80% of costs. About 20% of patients have been completely misdiagnosed, while many others are simply the victims of surgeons who are either practicing bad medicine or overtreating for profit.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFor example, some companies, such as Walmart and Lowe’s, are turning to the “Centers of Excellence” approach author Tom Emerick helped to pioneer while running benefits for Walmart. By determining which hospitals are adopting the highest standards of care, benefits managers can reduce the number of unnecessary high-cost surgeries and improve employees’ overall health. The solution-based approach offered by the book is unique, because it can be implemented by businesses today.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003eForeword David A. Rearick ix\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIntroduction xiii\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART I MOSTLY BAD NEWS 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 1 Myths and Facts about Your Health Benefit 3\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 2 Does Your Broker or Consultant Have Your Back? 25\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 3 It's Time for the Wellness Industry to Admit to Doping 39\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 4 This Is Your Health Benefit on Drugs 57\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 5 Your Employees' Health Is Too Important to Be Left to the Doctors 69\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 6 Are New Delivery Models Déjà Vu All Over Again, Again? 89\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART II MOSTLY GOOD NEWS 109\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 7 The Company-Sponsored Centers of Excellence Model 111\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 8 Hospital Safety: How to Get Your Employees Back to Work in One Piece 131\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 9 Real Care Coordination: The Only Other Way to Save Money 145\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 10 Goofus Retains a Wellness Vendor, Gallant Implements Well-Being 161\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePART III WHAT SHOULD YOU DO NEXT? 175\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eChapter 11 Health Insurance Exchanges: Should You Stay or Should You Go? 177\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eNotes 189\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eBibliography 193\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAcknowledgments 195\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAbout the Authors 197\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eTOM EMERICK\u003c\/b\u003e is a leading expert in health benefits design, global healthcare challenges, healthcare economics, evidence-based medicine, and process improvement. Currently, he is the President of Emerick Consulting LLC. Tom spent fifteen years at Walmart, designing and managing benefits for over 1.6 million employees. He has held positions with Burger King Corporation, British Petroleum, and American Fidelity Assurance Company.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAL LEWIS,\u003c\/b\u003e President of the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium, is widely credited with inventing disease management. Lewis is also the author of the award-winning \u003ci\u003eWhy Nobody Believes the Numbers\u003c\/i\u003e (Wiley). He provides procurement and outcomes consulting to health plans and human resources\/benefits departments, and administers the industry certification program in Critical Outcomes Report Analysis. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, where he also taught economics.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003eA simple solution exists for reducing your company's healthcare costs: spend less money. Until now, we've been taught the reverse: spend more money today for the promise of an ROI later, one that is usually made up. Hence your costs keep rising—due to massive overspending on diagnosis, testing, medication, procedures, and even prevention that in some cases actually harms your employees. \u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e explains what you, as the executive responsible for your company's healthcare spending, can do to slow this epidemic of healthcare-gone-wild, by spending less freely—but more wisely—on vendors, consultants, and providers.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eYou'll learn:\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cul\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow businesses can help employees avoid specialists and hospitals driving volume for profit\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow benefits consultants and brokers inflate your healthcare spending\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow wellness actually increases your costs . . . and can even harm your employees\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhy PBMs are so profitable—at your expense\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cb\u003eWhy strategies emphasizing coordinated care and employee well-being succeed where wellness fails\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cb\u003eAnd much more\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/li\u003e \u003c\/ul\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e offers unique solutions that your businesses can implement immediately, mostly at no cost. Start fighting back against healthcare costs, and start improving your employees' health today.\u003c\/p\u003e  \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e “This book is a roadmap for how some private equity companies already spend their money wisely on health benefits in their portfolio companies, rather than chase every fad that, as Emerick and Lewis point out, can and do harm your employees as well as your bottom line.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eTom Scully, Administrator, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (2001–2003); Senior Counsel, Alston \u0026amp; Bird; Partner, Welsh Carson, Anderson \u0026amp; Stowe\u003c\/b\u003e  \u003cp\u003e“Tom Emerick and Al Lewis have crafted a work that should, and hopefully will, become required reading in America’s boardrooms and executive suites, as well as the dysfunctional mess we refer to as Congress.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e—John J. Nance, Author of Why Hospitals Should Fly; co-author of Charting the Course\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e debunks the fads in corporate health benefit management and provides a road map for executives who want their employees to have top-quality care at an affordable price.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eRosemary Gibson, Author of The Treatment Trap: How Overuse of Medical Care is Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent It\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e“\u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e is a myth-shattering book that opens Pandora’s box! While many administrators, patients, and healthcare workers are caught in the cultural web of unnecessary procedures, accidents, waste, and poor quality, Emerick and Lewis empower health benefits managers to call the shots by debunking common myths and illuminating a clear, practical road map for change. Knowledge is power, and power is within these pages. This book will transform healthcare.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eKathleen Bartholomew, RN, MN, Co-Author of Charting the Course and Nurse Leader\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e“Tom Emerick is one of the nation’s most experienced and successful benefits managers. He is offering guideposts to avoiding overpricing and overtreatment in health plans. The need for such guideposts is a reproach to the American healthcare system. Nonetheless, the insights are profound for benefits managers and beneficial for employees.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eNortin M. Hadler, MD, MACP, MACR, FACOEM,Professor of Medicine and Microbiology\/Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author of Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e“In their new book, \u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e, Tom Emerick and Al Lewis manage to gore everyone’s ox in such a delightful way that you will laugh out loud even while you are cringing at some of the ways you too have fallen into the traps they so vividly describe. They blow up myths about the benefits of wellness, prevention, screening, PBMs, and much more. And they name names and provide links and references to support their suppositions, and, most important, they do the math. Even if you don’t agree with everything they posit, you will want to read this book at least a couple of times not only to mine the nuggets, but also to enjoy the humor.”\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003ePatricia Salber, MD, MBA, Host, The Doctor Weighs In and CEO of Health Tech Hatch\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e[This] new book by two of America’s most respected health care experts, Tom Emerick and Al Lewis, shows small and large business how to fight against rising health care costs and gain more effective treatments for employees. The book proposes multiple, practical steps that executives and small business owners can take to control costs and increase the effectiveness of the health benefit… For finance, human resources, and all executives concerned with health care spend, the book will show everything benefits consultants didn’t want their clients to know about where their money is really going. \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e(Insurance News)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe authors offer the following description:  \"\u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs\u003c\/i\u003e reveals the best ways for companies and small businesses to fight back, right now, against rising health care costs. This book proposes multiple, practical steps that you can take to control costs and increase the effectiveness of the health benefit.\"Remarkably, the book does as they say.  It casts asides fads, shibboleths, misconceptions, and just plain lies often offered by those many participants in the health care field who have collectively helped our country spend almost a fifth of our economy on a system that produces inferior results. It reminds us that those participants view that level of national spending as success: After all, your costs are their income…Oh, and did I mention that the book is funny and engaging? It is. You will have trouble putting it down.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003ePaul Levy, Not Running a Hospital\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIt’s been 70 years since Kaiser opened its first free medical clinic for employees. Since then, employers have spent over $20 trillion on providing health benefits. Yet despite all those years and all that money, no one has ever thought to write a book advising employers how to spend that money wisely … until now. \u003ci\u003eCracking Health Costs: How to Cut Your Company’s Health Costs and Provide Employees Better Care\u003c\/i\u003e is that book. For the most part, it succeeds: authors Tom Emerick and Al Lewis combine a wealth of experience with a healthy -- and, if the book‘s convincing arguments are to be believed, well-deserved -- skepticism of all the panaceas sold to employers by vendors, provider, brokers and consultants to allegedly reduce their health spending.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAlthough this is a how-to book, the good news is that it is far from a dull read. The Click and Clack of health care writing, Emerick and Lewis pepper their prose with one-liners like “the wellness industry needs to admit to doping” and chapter headings like the one about PBMs rip-offs: “This Is Your Health Benefit on Drugs.” They also claim “no animals were harmed in the writing of this book,” but that seems to be the one thing their convincing arguments can’t prove.\u003cbr\u003e —\u003cb\u003eJonathan Field, Managing Editor, Institute for Healthcare Consumerism\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wiley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47988999946469,"sku":"NP9781118636480","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781118636480.jpg?v=1761782377","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/cracking-health-costs-isbn-9781118636480","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}