General Motors To Audit Health Coverage Eligibility Of Hourly Workers' Dependents

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General Motors recently announced it will conduct an audit to determine whether hourly workers' dependents enrolled in the automaker's health plans ar eligible for coverage, the Detroit Free Press reports. GM is attempting to reduce the $4.6 billion it spends p.a. on health care by removing ineligible dependents (Detroit Free Press, 8/13).

This is not the first health benefits audit GM has conducted, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, a GM voice said this audit volition be more extensive than previous efforts. GM notified its 67,000 hourly workers that they throw until Aug. 20 to voluntarily get rid of dependents world Health Organization are ineligible from their health plans. The carmaker last class spent $1.3 billion on health care for hourly workers and their dependents. Workers who are found to have standard health benefits for ineligible dependents power be compulsory to reimburse the company, the spokesperson said.

According to HRAdvance, removing ineligible dependents can redeem an employer between 2% and 5%. GM estimates that 5% to 10% of dependents enrolled in its wellness plans ar ineligible. Paul Fronstin, music director of health research and educational programs for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, said that health benefits audits are becoming more than common as employers search to boil down growing health care expenditure (Terlep, Wall Street Journal, 8/13).


Reprinted with kind license from hTTP://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can vista the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email speech at hTTP://www.kaisernetwork.

Full Battle Rattle - movie review

The electric potential for wartime satire is almost unbearably high in the background for Tony
Gerber and Jesse Moss's documentary Full Battle Rattle, a fact which regrettably may
sustain left them unable to do very much more to capitalize on their matter, assuming that
it would provide the context and satire for itself. This can occur sometimes to
the best of filmmakers, where they become most paralyzed by the wide-cut weight of what they're
beholding. The better ones learn how to moil deeper, those on the lower end of the
scale skate along the surface. Gerber and Moss are the latter.



After introductory training merely before they are deployed to Iraq, many fresh-minted American
soldiers have some other stop to make. Somewhere in the Mojave desolate, the Army runs
an Iraqi Potemkin village where trainees ar sent to take part in tierce weeks of
simulated missions, complete with Arabic-speaking villagers and insurgents who like to
stir up trouble. Looking like a knocked-together film place, the aggregation of dun-colored
buildings called Medina Wasl also serves as a home to the people who ar "playing"
the villagers. That many of the villagers are Iraqi exiles, and probably making a better
and safer living than most of their countrymen, brings a bittersweet fucus serratus to their
scenes, which provide some of the only elements of humanity in this otherwise colourless
and dull film.



It is indeed a surreal sight to witness American soldiers in wide gear roar into
Medina Wasl and parlaying with shouting and gesticulating actors in order to maintain
the greenwich Village from devolving into finish anarchy. But Full Battle Rattle takes the integral
strangeness of that imaginativeness as a given and never quite expands on it, flunk to crowd
the story outside of the filmmakers' comfort zone. Given the infamous want of grooming
displayed by the Pentagon in the planning for the Iraq invasion, it represents a quantum
shift in scheme that such a specific training run aground would even be developed (a
exchangeable camp was created for jungle warfare training during Vietnam). But you wouldn't
know the import of this from Gerber and Moss' feeler, which brings in no outside
viewpoints or historical perspectives and instead sticks with the people living and
working in Medina Wasl.



Even with the subjects it does interview, Full Battle Rattle comes up short, in that it
rarely seems to ask any of the tougher questions, peculiarly to those in unvarying.
Only a very few officers talk at length, offering unilluminating platitudes for
the most part. The most glaring oversight, even so (and one that seems likely to have
been a compromise in order of magnitude to secure access in the low place) is the about complete
deficiency of discussion with the frontline soldiers being put through the training. One
would take that the viewpoints of those for whom the whole compound has been constructed
would have been of interest.



Given disturbingly more than screen time are the American veterans of the Iraq scrap,
who have come to Medina Wasl to use their fight experience in order to play the
bad guys. Somewhat