Parker, Smith & Feek

Just because we are an Insurance and Risk Management Professional Services firm, does not mean we are immune to the increasing costs of Healthcare. We advise our clients to seek out solutions to help manage their healthcare costs - however it has been increasingly difficult to just look at employee participant cost percentages and increased deductibles as a long term solution.

We have extended our service offerings to include a Wellness Executive. However, we can only consult on what we know ourselves. Our Wellness Executive started with us first. Our focus the past two year s has been on incorporating Wellness into our culture and how to affect behaviors that will make our employees healthier and happier, but also slow down our increasing healthcare costs in the long-term.

So how are we doing? Well it is hard to change behavior as we knew it would be. Our employees certainly all want to live healthier lives, but in the hustle and bustle of a work day, old habits are hard to break and new habits difficult to introduce. We also underestimated the impact our vendors have on food that filters into the office. Donuts, cookies and other fast food s continue to make its way into meetings.

But we are making progress. I see more of our employees walking during their lunch hour. We have two "on site" exercise programs that are popular with employees and are well attended. Our Wellness team is implementing a communications piece to our Vendors to ask for their participation in our wellness initiative.

As the U.S. enters a reform era for Healthcare, we are doing our small part to help our clients and our employees try new pro-active approaches to cost containment and hopefully cost reduction.

The Parker, Smith & Feek, Feekers n Sneekers Team (including the newest member Jacen, 8 months old) gearing up for the Fred Hutch Cancer Reseach Centers 2010 Shore Run. One of the goals for our company wellness program is to get out in the community, be active and support our local charities.

Stock markets are considered to be good leading indicators of future economic activity. Company values, or share prices, are based on expectations of future earnings, and future earnings are based on expected company revenue growth and profitability.

Recently, markets (Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500 stock index, Dow Jones Industrial Average) have taken a turn after an 80% increase in the broad averages from March 2009 to April 2010. The months of May and early June 2010 have witnessed sharp declines. What’s going on? Perhaps just a normal adjustment after a strong run-up in prices or is there more to it?

In the business pages the news of the day is more telling: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve warns that “the federal budget “appears” to be on an “unsustainable path” and the recent report of economic activity from the June ‘beige book’ released Wednesday notes that economic activity improved across the country: manufacturing picked up, retail sales grew, and housing was helped by the now expired tax credit, and a ‘modest’ recovery was unfolding. The Economic Optimism Index released this week, however, reported that consumer confidence fell sharply over the last month on continued job worries and fears about the future as uncertainties multiply: when will interest rates rise, what will new tax rates look like (after the Bush tax cuts expire), what will ObamaCare really cost, what will cap & trade and new energy policies cost, will ‘card check’ pass, and how much stronger will unions be, how will the financial sector be altered by new regulations. There is hardly a shortage of concerns out there at the moment.