Organizational and Environmental Profile
Employers Health Insurance Company is among the ten largest health insurance underwriters in the United States. The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Lincoln National Insurance Company, the sixth largest general insurance underwriter in the country.
Employers Health Insurance Company underwrites the health insurance plans for more than one million persons in 45 states. Federal and state regulation and proposed reform of the delivery and funding of health care services in the United States, thus, are matters of vital concern to Employers Health Insurance Company. The impetus for health care reform derives from problems associated with the cost of and access to health care services in this country.
Dynamic change characterizes the American health care environment in the 1990s (Hammonds, 1994, pp. 48-57). The changes in the health care environment result from a combination of factors--increasing costs of health care, changing societal values, advances in treatment therapies, technological innovation, changing demographics, and many others (Nichols and Stevens, 1992, pp. 86-95). Cost is a major factor involved in changes in the delivery of health care delivery services. Proposed national health care reform to assure access, increased consumer demands for quality health care, and public outcries for the control of health care costs are issues that must be addressed by entities--in both the public and private sectors--participating in the provision of health care services. The development of effective approaches to the solution of the problems associated with this issue, however, is a difficult task.
Approximately 60 percent of the American population is covered by private health care insurance programs (Congressional Budget Office, 1994, p. 15). Most of these programs--the very great majority--are either fully or partly funded by employers, while the remainder are f...