Millions of Americans lack health insurance, mostly as a result of their working conditions. Several groups fall between the cracks: part-time workers, freelance workers, and students for a start. And now that companies are slashing prices and trimming budgets, employee benefits like health care are often the first thing to be compromised. But many of us don’t realize how easy it is to get affordable coverage, no matter what our working conditions are like. If you’re one of the 50 million Americans without health insurance, here are the different ways you can go about getting it.

Corporate-Sponsored Insurance

This is the most common form of health insurance in the country: individuals who work for corporations, and receive health insurance through their business. Usually there are requirements, such as hourly commitment per week, or a number of months with the company, before the health insurance kicks in. Sometimes the employee pays part of the monthly fee; sometimes the company pays all of it. In addition, you always need to be careful of WHO exactly is covered in your corporate sponsored insurance. Don’t assume your family is covered—you may need to pay additional money so include your family on your policy.

Tags: corporate

Can outsourcing continue to grow at the rate we have seen over the last decade or so, during which it has become the management tool of choice for many major corporations, as well as the engine of growth for an army of suppliers drawn not only from the traditional ranks of the hardware suppliers, systems integrators and consultants, but more and more from the new industrial heavyweights of India?

To answer that question we need to look at how this growth started, what sustains it now, and what options are open to the current protagonists.

The current outsourcing boom has its roots in the IT outsourcing deals pioneered in the 1980s by the likes of EDS and IBM. The levers used were a mixture of focused expertise, economies of scale and financial and commercial engineering. These disciplines were expanded in the 1990s into wider functional areas â?? finance for example, with Accentureâ??s landmark deal with BP in 1991 â?? and BPO was born. Clients bought into the concept for a number of reasons, high amongst them the management theory that organizations should focus on what was core, and leave everything else to someone else.

Tags: corporate