Health Care

Two years ago, Indianapolis insurance broker Greg Wright started hawking an old kind of health insurance in a new way. He calls it a mini med. Others call it a limited-benefit health plan. It allows employers or their employees to pick coverage from a menu of items and receive insurance for only those items. If they don’t pick emergency room visits, for example, they’re not insured for them. It’s the kind of bare-bones benefits some retailers and restaurants, such as…

The Indiana Health Information Exchange recently hired Dr. Greg Larkin to be its chief medical officer. Larkin, who is the longtime head of Eli Lilly and Co.’s employee clinics and health plans, will focus on the exchange’s Quality Health First program, which aims to use a local database of doctors’ records and insurance claims to help doctors improve their quality of care. The program includes health insurance plans-such as Anthem, UnitedHealth and Medicare-that cover on average 70 percent of local…

Here’s a new strategy to control spiraling drug prices: multilevel marketing. That’s right. A new company called NuLegacy International LLC is deploying the tactics of Amway Corp. to give Americans-particularly those without health insurance-a break on prescription drug costs. The Texas-based company’s key selling points? Its cards are free. And they’re good for potentially large discounts off the full price of prescription drugs. Drugstores, in theory, get a higher volume of customers because of the discounts. “The timing is now,”…

Why pay to get employees healthy if they’re likely to leave in a few years? That used to be the killer question for wellness and disease management programs. But that attitude is changing. And employers like Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana are a good example of why. The not-for-profit, whose main mission is to help workers make a transition into other jobs, has enjoyed significant savings on health care costs even as it has ditched the employee-paid deductible on its…