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by Jan Peter Ozga
Building strategic relationships with the employer community is the focus of ASHA's collaboration with the National Business Coalition on Health (NBCH), a membership organization of employer-based health coalitions. Last month NBCH distributed to its members ASHA advocacy material that explained how speech, language, and hearing benefits are necessary for employees' health plans.
This action helps ASHA members by making employers and their associations aware of the need to cost-effectively address communication disorders. The effort is part of ASHA's 2006 Focused Initiative on Reimbursement in Health Care and Education.
NBCH members include 10,000 employee benefit/human resource managers. Their health care plans cover about 34 million employees and their dependents. The number of employers from coalition to coalition varies greatly; some have thousands (e.g., Pacific Business Group on Health in San Francisco) while others have dozens.
Last month NBCH's Kafi Grigsby discussed the role of the coalitions during a conference call meeting of ASHA's State Advocates for Reimbursement (STAR) Network. Grigsby encouraged STAR members to contact coalitions and become involved in their activities. She also noted that ASHA and NBCH share a common goal of helping employers to become wiser buyers of health care services. See NBCH's Web site at www.nbch.org .
Nancy Swigert, who chairs ASHA's Health Care Economics Committee, said, "We hope that this exposure will lead to STAR members developing a relationship with the coalition leaders in their area and to connect to their employee benefit managers...so that the value of preventing and treating communication disorders is impressed on these executives."
Planning is underway for ASHA to meet with the Mid-Atlantic Business Group on Health (M-ABGH) whose business members include both private and public employers, primarily located in Maryland. Two similar meetings are scheduled later this year with the Baltimore Board of Education and other public employers based in Maryland.
The meetings are being convened with assistance from ASHA's private health plan consultant, Pat Renaud of The Renaud Consultancy. Renaud's credentials include being an employee benefit director at a nationally known private and public companies and, most recently, as consultant to Maryland employers. Renaud was the first volunteer head of the Maryland Health Care Coalition, the forerunner to the M-ABGH.
DeAnne Owre, ASHA's vice president for governmental and social policies, noted, "The relationship we hope to build between business/health coalitions and individual employers–in Maryland and around the nation–should motivate U.S. firms to add or increase speech, language, and hearing benefits in their health care plans and improve the health and productivity of America's workforce."
Jan Peter Ozga is director of private health plan advocacy. Contact him at jozga@asha.org , or call 800-498-2071, ext. 4431.
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