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Aetna News -- Will require their vendors offer health insurance

News has come down that Aetna Inc. will soon be requiring its vendors to provide health insurance for their respective employees. Aetna currently has more than 1,300 vendors. Ronald Williams, Aetna’s Chief Executive stated that Aetna has "both an opportunity and an obligation" to address the problem of the staggering number of employees without health insurance. He reported to shareholders "We expect nothing less from the companies that do business with Aetna." Assisting employees acquire health insurance at this time is seen as a very good move for Aetna. The goal is for at least 80 percent of Aetna’s vendors to offer health insurance benefits by the year 2010. All are expected to offer benefits by 2011. These vendors are ordinary companies that supply Aetna with such things as food, design work, cleaning services, paper and other products and services.

This may be seen by some as a means of creating more health insurance business for themselves but not so, says Susan Millerick, a spokeswoman for Aetna. "This is not about building up our membership. It's about reducing the number of uninsured," she said. "The goal is not to be in any way punitive. The goal is to find out where the gaps are in health insurance and work with vendors on how to close them." To begin, Aetna will solicit information from its suppliers and vendors to determine what benefits those vendors are currently offering their employees. Next, Aetna wants to explore those vendors’ possiblities along with them.

Most of the vendors are large companies that already offer health insurance. Greater attention may be required for the 5 to 10 percent who are small businesses. These probably don’t provide health benefits to their employees, Millerick said. So it can be seen that these are reasonable goals. Likely cost is a major reason why small businesses don’t believe they can offer health insurance. To resolve this, Aetna plans to educate these companies as to lower-cost alternatives. One very popular alternative is the High-Deductible health plan, in various forms. Others are insurance pools or "mandate-light" insurance plans, Millerick added. "We're wading in. We don't have all the details fleshed out on how this will work."