Uninsured RX

While CIOs share some skills and challenges regardless of where they work, the state of the CIO differs remarkably between industries. Financial services CIOs have the highest status. Insurance CIOs are the best paid. Many differences speak to how an industry operates: Retail CIOs are obsessed with inventory management, while manufacturing is consumed with business process. This paper discusses what makes the CIO role in each industry unique and what CIOs say about the kind of executive who is likely to find success in each domain.

Feeling the pinch of double-digit increases in insurance premiums over the past several years, a number of employers have rolled out various kinds of health-improvement initiatives intended to nudge at least some workers toward lifestyle changes that could help rein in medical costs. While these programs, also known as wellness plans, have been around for decades, companies are now giving employees a really good reason to participate: breaks on their insurance premiums.

Health-care insurers are among the very few American companies willing to worry about their problems in public. Like hypochondriacs counting their ailments, they trot out a long list: higher costs for medical equipment; bigger payments for doctors; the rising price of drugs. Fail to treat these symptoms, goes the logic, and the result will be terrible, just as it was for four years beginning in 1996, when the industry continuously lost money. Prices and returns in the insurance business tend to run in cycles. Unusually large returns attract capital, which drives them down. There are other worries as well. A spate of mergers has raised concerns among doctors about too much concentration.