Employee Benefits and the New Health Care Landscape: How Private Exchanges are Bringing Choice and Consumerism to America's Workforce

Introduction

If you are reading this book, you likely have a vested interest in the future of health insurance and, by association, health care, in America.

Health care is about the prevention and treatment of disease. There are lots of great books out there about fixing the U.S. health care system (Who Killed Health Care? by Regina Herzlinger and Redefining Health Care by Michael E. Porter come to mind). This book limits the conversation primarily to how we pay for and receive these and other crucial services in an employer-sponsored environment—not how we improve the services themselves.

Health insurance in the United States has long been inextricably linked to employment, with companies typically offering limited choices in plans. In fact, ...