Can you remember your first credit card? Oh my. My memory of that is strikingly clear! It was April 1984 (yep, I’m old) and I was a senior at LSU, when a credit card from JC Penney’s just showed up in my mailbox at the student union.
Part 1: Background
Since early in 2013, American citizens who don’t get an offer of affordable health insurance through work (that’s about 10% of working adults) have had another significant coverage option.
I love working for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana. And I am 100% sold on the notion that the best way to pay for a person’s healthcare is by creating entities just like us and giving them the freedom to make local decisions and manage our healthcare funds. Read more
Mike originally wrote and published this piece in 2015. Blue Cross has gotten similar messages in the years since, so he decided to go back and see if his answer still stands. He’s added more details in this post, but the crux of his answer is the same. Read more
Years ago, I saw a wonderful movie called “Other People’s Money.” If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do, especially the monologues in the last 20 minutes of the film. Really first-class lessons in economics and capitalism encoded into a movie.
At one point in the movie, a merger and acquisition specialist (played by Danny DeVito) uses this (paraphrased) example to explain how technology changes our lives: Read more
A little over 10 years ago, I was sitting in a tiny hotel room in Washington, D.C., waiting for a phone call from a friend who is a lobbyist for our Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. It was Christmas Eve 2009, and we were awaiting the final vote of the U.S. Senate on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I remember very clearly thinking that there was nothing to stop the then-Democratic majority from passing the ACA. Certainly, they had put a ton of work, time and effort into the law. But — they put much less time into gaining the trust of the opposition.
