Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

I've wanted to write this brief post for years but it has not been the right time until now.  Every year when benefits go up you hear, "My paycheck isn't keeping up with my benefits" because pay goes up at, say, 3% and insurance goes up maybe 5%.  This year our insurance isn't going up at all so I can stick a pin in this fallacy without seeming like I am being defensive. Okay so let's do the math.  The lowest allowable pay for any position is $7.25/hr. With 2,080 working hours in a year, assuming no overtime, anyone reading this post and working full time is making at least $15,080/yr. Assuming a 3% increase (which appears to be close to the market for this year) that person will receive an increase of $452.  Now let's move on to Benefits.  Medical insurance is going to cost the average family about $4,500/yr in premiums. Let's assume a 5% increase, which again is pretty typical, and you come up with an increase of $225....

This is not a current problem for our plan; but a preview of what may be coming in the months ahead. A few years ago Walgreens set out on what seemed to be their mission; that you could stand in the parking lot of any one of their stores and see the sign for the next closest one.  There is now a Walgreens in just about every neighborhood and sometimes it seems there's one on every corner.  That this was their mission; to take market share from other competitors, was in the normal course of business.  In the past few months, however, they have begun flexing their buying power and fighting pharmacy benefit networks.  Their goals are anything but laudable. Their position is that without them any pharmacy network would be incomplete and so they should receive a higher reimbursement for the prescriptions they dispense. Their latest row has been with Express Scripts.  Their proposal to Express Scripts, according to my sources, would have made them the ...