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Room for Debate asks whether changes in the way mental illness is treated can complement gun control.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/business/daily-stock-market-activity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
It used to be that H.R. was a single, physical place that workers could visit — to pick up a form, ask a question, seek advice, lodge a complaint. Now if a company still has a stand-alone H.R. office, it’s probably much smaller than it used to be. If workers need help, they may have to call an “800” number, consult a Web portal or use a software program.
The outsourcing of H.R. has accelerated over the last decade and will continue to do so, said Lisa Rowan, a research vice president at IDC, the market research firm. While some companies may entrust their H.R. needs to a single outside firm, it’s more common to parcel out functions to a range of outside providers, she said.
Outsourcing allows companies to offload work that isn’t part of their core business. It also saves money. But some H.R. experts are concerned that the trend has gone too far, to the point that employees are suffering in areas like training and career development, and that employers are losing crucial business opportunities.
If you look at the wide-ranging traditional duties of human resources, it’s no wonder that companies are seeking outside help. “H.R. is supposed to be responsible for finding, developing, retaining and training the best people,” Suzanne Lucas, author of a blog called the Evil HR Lady, said in an e-mail. It can also be responsible for benefits, compensation, employee and labor relations, business partners, data collection and legal issues.
Outsourcing firms can take up various tasks, from payroll to benefits to recruiting, to free up a client to focus on its strengths, said Don Weinstein, senior vice president for product management at ADP, a large H.R. outsourcing firm. The new health care reform legislation, for example, will have a big impact on employers, some of whom may be overwhelmed by its complexities. Firms like ADP have expertise in areas like this, and thus relieve a big burden, Mr. Weinstein said.
In the last 10 years, the focus of human resources has shifted toward legal compliance and data collection, said Ms. Lucas, who now lives in Switzerland but has 10 years of H.R. experience in the United States. At a company that doesn’t have the means to hire specialists, she said, outsourcing can allow it to “gain vast resources for a relatively small amount of money.”
Problems arise if outside vendors are concerned mainly with maximizing their income and lowering their costs, resulting in “low flexibility and poor service,” Ms. Lucas said. It’s in the best interest of employees at this kind of vendor “to provide as little service as possible,” she said. And at such a vendor’s call center, she said, “I don’t even have to care about morale at your site, because it doesn’t affect my day.”
(Mr. Weinstein asserted that ADP is able to maintain high-quality, individualized service through its call centers.)
MS. LUCAS said that if human-resources professionals work for the same company as the employees they serve, their interests are more closely aligned. If your performance is good, “the company will make more money,” she explained. “A better-performing company means a better bonus for me, a happier workplace, and fewer problems all around.”
But many internal H.R. functions have been “cut to the bone,” said Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Therefore, the idea that companies will be more strategic about human resources after they outsource “requires some heroic assumptions,” said Professor Cappelli, author of “Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs.” Supervisors may be able to take over some important roles, but many of the people who were experts at recruiting, training and career development have been laid off, he said. So is it any surprise, he added, that companies complain that they can’t find good people?
“The world has moved toward self-service,” he said, and that puts the emphasis on technology, and on information over advice. Sometimes, he said, “there’s literally no one to talk to.”
Other times, there’s the call center. There, Ms. Lucas said, you may find someone who is reading from a script — and often that’s enough. But when your problem is complex, it can be hard or downright impossible to have it solved, she said.
“The best outsourcing leaves some competent H.R. staff as employees,” she said. “When the call center can’t answer a question, they can refer you to the in-house person. It saves money and still provides individualized expertise for employees.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/jobs/more-companies-are-outsourcing-their-human-resources-work.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Into this grim situation, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum step forward to offer hope. Or do they?
For there is an unnerving tension at the core of “That Used to Be Us,” a discordant emotional counterpoint. I don’t think it’s a disagreement between the authors so much as a disagreement within each of them.
Friedman and Mandelbaum repeatedly describe themselves as “optimists,” albeit “frustrated” optimists. Yet the stories they tell repeatedly suggest very different and less reassuring conclusions.
The main line of the book’s argument will arrive with congenial familiarity. Friedman is one of America’s most famous commentators, Mandelbaum one of its most distinguished academic experts on foreign policy. Their views — and their point of view — are well known. They speak from just slightly to the left of the battered American political center: for free trade, open immigration, balanced budgets, green energy, consumption taxes, health care reform, investments in education and infrastructure.
There is a lot to like and admire in this approach. It is progressive and liberal in the best senses of both those words. It has resulted in a book that is at once enlightened and enlightening. Friedman — not that you need me to tell you this — is a very good reporter. He takes us with him to visit a high school for disadvantaged youths that triumphantly sends 100 percent of its graduates to college, then to view a new fighter jet that runs on fuel 50 percent of which is derived from the oil of pressed mustard seeds. The partnership with Mandelbaum has been fruitful, curbing Friedman’s notorious verbal excesses and stiffening the book with extra analytic rigor: a chart detailing the collapse of federal support for research and development is especially disturbing.
Together they offer a range of examples of how America can do better than it has done in the recent past. Despite its slightly misleading subtitle, “That Used to Be Us” is not really a “how to” book, not really a policy book. Friedman and Mandelbaum go very light on the programmatic details. Instead, they emphasize the power of good examples: instance after instance of forward-looking C.E.O.’s, effective military commanders, tough educational administrators, responsible politicians who have made things work. The book is more a demonstration than an argument: The situation isn’t hopeless! Success is possible! See here and here and here and here.
And yet . . . Friedman and Mandelbaum also point out things like this: New military recruits arrive much less physically fit than previous generations because of a lack of exercise, and they come in with what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calls “a mixed bag of values.” Dempsey goes on: “I am not suggesting they have bad values, but among all the values that define our profession, first and most important is trust. If we could do only one thing with new soldiers, it would be to instill in them trust for one another, for the chain of command and for the nation.” O.K., so that’s alarming.
And so is this point from Arne Duncan, the secretary of education: “Currently about one-fourth of ninth graders fail to graduate high school within four years. Among the O.E.C.D. countries, only Mexico, Spain, Turkey and New Zealand have higher dropout rates than the United States.”
How about this statistic from Friedman and Mandelbaum: “Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California’s general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education.”
Or this, which comes from the Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz: “The top 1 percent of Americans now take in roughly one-fourth of America’s total income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, . . . the top 1 percent now controls 40 percent of the total. This is new. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”
Or this, from the Pentagon via Arne Duncan: “Seventy-five percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record or are physically unfit.”
David Frum is the editor of FrumForum.com.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=223f46008c8e9755637377b02ea0fdd1
Beyond Common Ground
On Health Care Costs
To the Editor:
In “Seriously, Some Consensus About Health Care” (Economic View, June 19) N. Gregory Mankiw contended that Democrats and Republicans might be wrong in agreeing that health care costs can be reined in, even as they disagree about how such control is achieved. He then asks, “if controlling the cost of health care fails, what is Plan B?”
I would suggest that Plan B should be to examine how other advanced democracies have managed to provide health care coverage to all, while spending less of their gross domestic product on health care than we do in the United States.
No one should say that controlling health costs may be futile when so many countries have already done so through various combinations of competitive forces and government regulatory action. And while the United States leaves millions of people uninsured, these countries provide coverage for all.
Craig Ramsay
Columbus, Ohio, June 19
The writer is a professor of politics and government at Ohio Wesleyan University.
To the Editor:
N. Gregory Mankiw provides a helpful perspective on the politics of health care reform, but does not include an important point about the way free-market competition works.
Perfect competition requires perfect information, which is not part of the health insurance market. Supporters of President Obama’s health care law don’t necessarily believe private competition is good in this arena; they may simply take it as a political given.
In the new law, choosing among private plans in a regulated exchange is an improvement over the current system, in which comparison is difficult for lack of information. The plan is an effort to make competition work.
Jennie Kaufman
Brooklyn, June 20
To the Editor:
In comparing the recent health care reform law to the Medicare proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, the column posed this question: “If choosing among competing private plans on a government-regulated exchange is a good idea for someone at age 50, why is it so horrific for someone who is 70?”
First, 50-year-olds who seek to buy health insurance are most likely near the peak of their earning power and thus more capable of paying in one way or another for their insurance — which might not be too expensive because of the relatively modest cost of insuring someone who is that age.
But people who are 70 are generally retired, living on stagnant or reduced income. Their insurance would be far more expensive because of the higher use of services at their age.
The plan to treat retired Americans the same as 50-year-olds for health insurance purposes misses this crucial difference. Dene F. Karaus
Wayne, N.Y., June 19
Letters for Sunday Business may be sent to sunbiz@nytimes.com.
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Two weeks ago, the international consulting firm McKinsey Company threw itself into the rancorous partisan debate over the 2010 health care overhaul by publishing research that appeared to predict that many employers would dump their health insurance plans when the new law fully took effect in 2014. The new law offers subsidies to help low-income people purchase health insurance from state-run exchanges, and it also penalizes companies with more than 50 employees when they fail to offer those employees affordable coverage. As McKinsey notes, paying the penalty will cost less than providing the insurance, so companies could profit by socializing that cost.
Nonetheless, the finding was surprising, and controversial, because, as The Agenda reported in April 2010 (and also in 2009), most economists say they believe that a mix of market pressures, a tax incentive and the penalty will deter all but a relative handful of employers from casting off their health insurance plans. The Obama administration slammed McKinsey’s apparent prediction, and Senate Democrats demanded that the consultants release the proprietary methodology behind it. For several days, McKinsey refused.
I say “appeared to predict” because on Monday, when McKinsey finally released the methodology, it came with a statement insisting that the survey had done no such thing. Rather, “it captured the attitudes of employers and provided an understanding of the factors that could influence decision-making related to employee health benefits.” Two paragraphs later, the statement continued, “We understand how the language in the article could lead the reader to think the research was a prediction, but it is not.”
The Agenda understands, too: The original article was titled “How U.S. Health Care Reform Will Affect Employee Benefits.” Its second sentence declared, “While the pace and timing are difficult to predict, McKinsey research points to a radical restructuring of employer-sponsored health benefits following the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act.” One word that appears frequently throughout the article is the future-tense “will,” not the conditional “could” — as in, “30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering E.S.I.” — employer-sponsored insurance — “in the years after 2014.” (The Times reported Tuesday that Democrats were not impressed by McKinsey’s explanation.)
Still, the distinction between making predictions and capturing present attitudes — or, really, aspirations — is important. It should come as no surprise that employers, given their choice, would rather focus on their business than go through the administrative hassle of arranging health insurance for their work force. Companies probably wouldn’t offer it now if their employees didn’t demand it and weren’t willing to trade away a portion of their wages to have it. (Economists say that, contrary to broad public perception, employers don’t pay more to offer health insurance. Instead, insurance is merely a component of total pay — and employers that stopped offering it would have to provide some other, well, compensating compensation.)
Strikingly, the overall impression from the McKinsey article is that employees’ views count for little in the coming debate over whether employers will provide health care — or that they’ll accept whatever employers choose to offer. Here, for example, are two findings from McKinsey, based on separately conducted consumer research: 85 to 90 percent of employees would still work for their current company even after it dropped health insurance coverage, but only 60 percent would demand increased compensation to make up for it. That may, or may not, be true in 2011 — we’ll leave it to others to assess the soundness of McKinsey’s survey techniques — when the prospect of an employer dropping health insurance is too abstract for many in the work force to think seriously about what their coverage is worth. But who can say how they’ll think in 2014, as the new system is put in place — accompanied, no doubt, by extensive media coverage?
Employers might see an opportunity to shed their insurance burden once 2014 arrives, but the system that’s coming is so new and different — and complicated — that it seems foolish to presume this will happen right away, if at all. The new law could ultimately dismantle the underpinnings of workplace-provided insurance, but employees, too, will probably have something to say about this. It could take years, maybe even a generation, for people to grow comfortable with buying insurance on their own, and if they continue to insist on insurance from their employer, or prospective employer, in the meantime, companies are likely to comply. That’s what happened in Massachusetts after that state passed its own health care reform in 2006, as health economist Jonathan Gruber told The Agenda the last time we looked at this. There, employer-sponsored coverage actually increased.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e8000b752a5b4107ee5af9e0adfba251