bnefit.info

In this era of creative financing and cost management tools, many employers are looking for new ways to help employees finance their health care expenses.

As an employer, you want to provide good coverage, but the cost increases in recent years have been tough to handle. A typical response to these increases may be to select a high-deductible insurance product that lowers your cost. However, there is a better solution.

Think HMO. That’s right – health maintenance organizations. The HMOs of today offer a whole new generation of health care financing tools that every employer should consider.

It’s not your father’s HMO.
You may have heard bad stories or had a rough experience in the past. However, times have changed. HMO plans today offer extensive provider networks, excellent coverage for preventive care, the ability to frequently change a primary care physician and outstanding prescription drug coverage through broad pharmacy networks.

HMOs take the surprise out of the bill.
With most health insurance plans, an employee is responsible for a percentage of the cost of care, often 20 percent or 25 percent. This can add up very quickly, and employees can’t predict what their expense is going to be.

With an HMO structured co-pay plan, an employee knows up front the expenses associated with most covered services. For example, an employee may have a $20 copay for a primary care physician (PCP) visit, which will include all services provided in that visit. Each time employees go to their PCP, they can expect to pay $20 – no surprises there.

Higher co-pays offer savings.
The days of nickel sodas and 25-cent phone calls are long gone – and so are $5 and $10 co-pay plans. It’s time to rethink the value of co-pays. New HMO plans have higher co-pays, some as high as $30 for a primary care visit and $50 for a specialist. But that covers all services provided during that visit. That’s a valuable cost limit these days.

HMOs offer bold new designs.
New HMO plans have fresh cost-sharing strategies that provide low employee out-ofpocket expenses in some areas while controlling your costs by increasing employee expenses through deductibles in other areas.

In most deductible-based plans, employees have a high deductible that applies to all services. However, with these new focused-deductible HMO plans, the deductible is limited to specific services, such as hospital care or prescription drugs. After the deductible is satisfied, a co-pay also applies to that service.

Furthermore, with these plans, employees continue to have a co-pay instead of a deductible for highly utilized areas such as physician or specialist visits.

HMOs are FSA and HRA compatible.
Many HMO plans can be used with flexible spending and health reimbursement accounts, enabling employees to decide how some of their health care dollars are used. Many carriers are also developing health spending account-compatible HMO plans.

HMOs offer more than health insurance.
Today’s HMO plans offer health improvement programs such as discounted fitness club memberships and valueadded options that let employees take charge of their own health.

There are two primary reasons to revisit today’s HMO – savings to you and savings to your employees. Rediscover today’s HMO – you’ll be pleased with what you find.

Buttons for hospitals can be a great way to spread motivation, identify people, and help with the healing process. There are a great many uses and fun projects that hospitals can do utilizing buttons. From Public Relations to patient care, buttons can serve you well in a hospital environment.

Any hospital with a children’s ward should have a button maker machine. Children in the hospital are often frightened, disoriented and of course ill. For patients who are able to sit up and draw, button making can help fill those hours between visitors, occupy their mind and make them feel useful. A positive outlook plays a critical role in a patient’s recovery and for children, it is important to inspire creativity to take their minds off their environment. Button making for the children can be both beneficial to their mental health and fun.

Provide a template to a child and some crayons or markers. Family members can bring photos or other flat items to add to the button. The children can be left to their own creativity or a daily or weekly theme can be used. For children who are long term patients, giving them a button to make everyday can ease anticipation and give them something positive to look forward to the next day. This will also help in establishing some form of routine, which in smaller children will help them feel safe in their environment. Completed buttons can be worn by the children, their families, the staff, or displayed on bulletin boards outside the door of their room. Displaying the buttons will make walking the halls interesting and fun for both children and family.

Buttons can be another great gift item in the hospital gift store. These are an inexpensive and easy item to make for sale in the shop. “Congratulations!” in pink or blue on a button for births would be a great idea for the new older brother or sister to purchase for mom. This same button can be added to a stuffed bear or bunny. “It’s a Girl!”, “It’s a Boy!”, and “Get Well” would all be great sayings for buttons to be added to stuffed animals or cards that are sold in the gift shop. For example, you can post a sign that reads “Buy a Stuffed animal and get a button for only a dollar more.” Buttons make great keepsakes and are so inexpensive to produce that even at the price of one dollar you can make a handsome profit for the gift shop.

Buttons for patients and staff are another use for the button making machines. An interesting proposition for the new parents is to have a “New Dad” and “New Mom” button made up for them with the name, birth date, weight and length of their new child. These are great keepsakes for parents to put in baby albums. Proud parents can wear these buttons in the hospital and you can sell additional buttons for their family members such as grandparent’s aunts and uncles. Imagine the pride on a new older brother’s face as he wears a button that reads “Ask me about my new baby sister”. These buttons show that you go the extra mile for your patients and their family.

TRAINING TO RUN:

Everything depends on your level of fitness. Lance Armstrong said running a marathon was the hardest thing he ever did, I’m just happy to finish one. His sub 3 hour marathon equate to my 1/2 marathon time give or take some minutes. The Basics of running are simple, efficiency of stride, lactic acid treshold, base training, patience and determination.

Training plan: If your just starting out, I would suggest running 3 times a week. I would also run a 3 week cycle.The first week of the cycle you train at a specific level. The second week you increase by 10-20%. The third week you scale back to lower than first week’s level. This give’s your body time to recuperate and prevents injuries. The first week of your next cycle should be increased by 10-15%. After 3 cycles, reduce you first week pace by 10%. This will work – you just need to be patient.
For example : Distance of every run in the week.

Cycle 1: wk1:1km – wk2:1.2km – wk3:0.9km

Cycle 2 : wk1:1.2km – wk2:1.4km – wk3:1.1km

Cycle 3 : wk1:1.4km – wk2:1.6km – wk3:1.3km

Cycle 4 : wk1:1.2km – wk2:1.4km – wk3:1.1km

Cycle 5 : wk1:1.4km – wk2:1.6km – wk3:1.3km

Cycle 6 : wk1:1.6km – wk2:1.8km – wk3:1.4km

I think you get the picture.

Beginner:
The best method to ease into running is the run walk method. Your body should adjust to running more easily using this method. The time you spend running and the time you spend walking depends again on your fitness level. If you need to walk longer or are able to run more, just do it. You run for 30-60 seconds, depending , you walk for 30 seconds. You do this for a week. The next week you increment you run by 10 seconds, but keep the walk to 30 seconds. As the weeks progress you should be able to gain substancial increase you capacity of running. The ideal for the run walk method is to get up to 10 minutes of running and 1 minute of walking, but it all depends on how you feel. Once you are able to keep a pace of 10-1 for 30 minutes you can start to increase the 10 minute run by 10-20% every week.

The pace you should be in is a Zone 1 pace. Zones are calculated by the hearth rate that is attained with physical activity. Zone 1 pace is (220 – your age) X 60 or 70% – I’m 36 , (220bpm – 36) X 70% = 130 bpm. This is a foundation building pace. This pace is used on long runs because it enables your body to manage lactic acid. A friendly fuel when absorbed properly lactic acid becomes running enemy when it is out of control. The longer you can run at this pace, the more your body will improve his capability to absorb the acid. This is endurance building, and it is the first step to having a great run.

Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles’ Foe, It’s Fuel – New York Times
The notion that lactic acid was bad took hold more than a century ago, but more recent research suggests that it is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste …

If you need to do more sports during the week, cross training should be your choice. Gym work to strenghten the abs are a plus. Cycling or spinning also get your heart going without the impact on your knees.

If you are able to run for 30 minutes, my suggestion to you is to get out there and find a nice friendly 5k. This is a celebration of life , a celebration of your new found passion: Running. Turkey trot your way to the end.

Intermediate:
You’ve acheived your first goal and that first 5k is now behind you. You’ve adapted your body to running and now can run 3 times a week for 30 minutes each time and can even push this a bit further.

You now are able to move to the next level. First thing to do is add another running day to your week. This will help you put on the miles and will help you adjust even more to a runner’s regiment. Second thing to do is start mixing up your running workouts. 1 slow long run (zone 1), 2 normal half hour runs (zone 1 maximized- bottom zone 2), and 1 run that is totally different from the other types of runs that your body is accustomed to do. My suggestion is either Hill running or intervals.

Hill running is simple: Find a hill – run it to the top (if you can get up there fine – if not – stop where your about to collapse) – once up there – walk back down. Do this 10 times and make sure you keep a pace that you can accomplish it 10 times. If you cannot run it – walk up the hill. This will put pressure on your big leg muscles and should bring your body close to lactic acid threshold, walking back down will help your body manage that load and will push it farther and farther as the workouts progress.

Interval: Warm up with a 15 minute turkey trot. Once you are warmed up – bolt it for 100 meters – as fast as you canb without collapsing before you done that 100 meters (85% of your max speed) – just before blowing up – walk for 1 minutes. Repeat this for at least 1000 meters (10 X 100 meters). If your body is not too broken, turkey trot your way back home for another 15 minutes … this is great for pushing your lactic acid treshold even farther.

The point of pushing your body this way is to enable you to start picking up speed and finding a way to sustain it. Also – this is a good thing for your running body as it is called upon to adjust and find new ways of coping. Doing the same thing week after week can cause your body to adapt to it and migth inder your progression.

The goal you might have with these exercises is to improve you PR for your 5K or 10K time, enabling you to get faster and faster. Being faster and enabling your body to cope with it will help you out on your long slow runs. Your lactic acid overload might not be as great as it was before and your threshold of pain and endurance will be hightened.

Once you mastered these techniques and can now run for an hour or more on your slow long runs, a 10K or a half marathon is well within your reach.

Experts:
Elite runners are a breed on their own. They usually have a running stride that looks like a work of art and also have a cardio that can sustain 15-20 km/hour run tempo. Not everybody can acheive this type of running pace and keep it for 2 hours or more.

If your at this level and are reading this, you’ve humored me enough to keep going and could potentially write an article on this web site about how you go about your training. Since Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi are not here to add some advice, I will risk myself and add my two cents to this level of running fitness.

First thing, and expert runner should be able to run in the zone 1 range all day long, barely breaking a sweat. These athletes are fine tuned running machines and have close to the same body fat as an average model on a cat walk. That said, the muscle mass is fine tuned and the heart is usually as big as a football :0).

I have one friend who’s an ultrafit retired cyclist (retired from all out competition but still competes at the fun level) – I put him on my treadmill with a heart monitor and asked him to start running. When he reached my top speed that I could sustain for more than 5 minutes (11 km/h) – his heart rate was barely beating. He could run at this pace for hours, I could barely do it for 5 minutes.

That’s the difference between joe runner and Meb Keflezighi, the ability to acheive a speed and endurance that boggles the mind, strains the body, and pounds the heart.

These people usually have trained since they were kids and benefit from coaches and proper climate atmospheres (high altitude training) to enable them to reach the next level. They also have a very strict meal regiment and cannot afford to indulge in life’s simple pleasures (Beer – wine – cheese cake …) without paying a hefty price performancew wise.

If you are an elite runner and would like to submit and article – please do so right here. I will be happy to put a link back to your website.

Anyways, I Got To Run.