PoppaGator,

I could not agree more.

We recently had an employee meeting with the representative of the insurance brokerage firm that worked with my agency to come up with the current arrangement. (And given current realities of the status of healthcare and healthcare financing in this country, I'll repeat myself and say it is pretty creative.)

The emphasis was on containment of health care costs and risk management. He made providers of health care out to be greedy bad guys. He did not realize he was addressing a room full of people who provide both public and private healthcare, all of whom had recently been out of work because of companies closing due to reimbursement rates that are inadequate to cover the cost of care, and none of whom gross more than $45,000 per year.

He wore a nice, expensive suit, and had a Coach bag for his laptop.

Not that he was a bad guy. And not that cost containment is not important. But it is only one half of the equation, and his paradigm rendered him absolutely unaware that half of the picture was missing.