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Can corporations shift workers with high medical costs from the company health plan into online insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act? Some employers are considering it, say benefits consultants.

"It's all over the marketplace," said Todd Yates, a managing partner at Hill, Chesson & Woody, a North Carolina benefits consulting firm. "Employers are inquiring about it, and brokers and consultants are advocating for it."

Health spending is driven largely by a few patients with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, and those who need expensive treatments, such as organ transplants. Since most big corporations are self-insured, shifting even one high-cost worker out of the company plan could save the employer hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — while increasing the cost of claims absorbed by the marketplace policy by a similar amount.

And the health law might not prohibit it, opening a door to potential erosion of employer-based coverage.

"Such an employer-dumping strategy can promote the interests of both employers and employees by shifting health care expenses on to the public at large," wrote two University of Minnesota law professors in a 2011 paper that basically predicted the present interest. The authors were Amy Monahan and Daniel Schwarcz.

It's unclear how many companies, if any, have moved sicker workers to exchange coverage, which became available only in January. But even a few high-risk patients could add millions of dollars in costs to those plans. The costs could be passed on to customers in the form of higher premiums and to taxpayers in the form of higher subsidy expense.

Here's how it might work. The employer shrinks the hospital and doctor network to make the company plan unattractive to those with chronic illness. Or, the employer raises copayments for drugs needed by the chronically ill, also rendering the plan unattractive and perhaps nudging high-cost workers to look at other options.

At the same time, the employer offers to buy the targeted worker a high-benefit plan in the marketplaces. A so-called platinum plan could cost $6,000 or more a year for an individual. But that's still far less than the $300,000 a year that, say, a hemophilia patient might cost the company.

The employer might also give the worker a raise to buy the policy directly.

The employer saves money. The employee gets better coverage. And the health law's marketplace plan —required to accept all applicants at a fixed price during open enrollment periods — takes on the cost.

"The concept sounds to[o] easy to be true, but the ACA has set up the ability for employers and employees on a voluntary basis to choose a better plan in [the] Individual Marketplace and save a significant amount of money for both!" says promotional material from a company called Managed Exchange Solutions (MES). "MES works with [the] reinsurer, insurance carrier and other health management organizations to determine [the] most likely candidates for the program."

Consultant Benefit Controls, based in Charlotte, N.C., produced the Managed Exchange Solutions pitch last year. But Matthew McQuide, a vice president with Benefit Controls, said the company ultimately decided not to offer the strategy to its clients.

"Though we believe it's legal" as long as employees agree to the change, "it's still gray," he said. "We just decided it wasn't something we wanted to promote."

Shifting high-risk workers out of employer plans is prohibited for other kinds of taxpayer-supported insurance.

For example, it's illegal to induce somebody who is working and over 65 to drop company coverage and rely entirely on the government Medicare program for seniors, said Amy Gordon, a benefits lawyer with McDermott Will & Emery. Similarly, employers who dumped high-cost patients into temporary high-risk pools established by the health law are required to repay those workers' claims to the pools.

"You would think there would be a similar type of provision under the Affordable Care Act" for plans sold through the marketplace portals, Gordon said. "But there currently is not."

Moving high-cost workers to a marketplace plan would not trigger penalties under the health law as long as an employer offered an affordable company-wide plan with minimum coverage, experts said. (Workers cannot use tax credits to help pay premiums for an exchange plan in such a case, either.)

Half a dozen benefits experts said they were unaware of specific instances of employers shifting high-cost workers to exchange plans. Spokesmen for AIDS United and the Hemophilia Federation of America, both advocating for patients with expensive, chronic conditions, said they didn't know of any, either.

But employers seem increasingly interested.

"I have gotten probably about half a dozen questions about it in the last month or so from our offices around the country," says Edward Fensholt, director of compliance for the Lockton Companies, a large insurance broker and benefits consultant. "They're passing on questions they're getting from their customers."

Still, Fensholt said, "We just don't think that's a good idea. That needs to be kind of an under-the-radar deal, and under-the-radar deals never work." Plus, he added, "it's bad public policy to push all these risks into the public exchange."

Hill, Chesson & Woody isn't recommending it either.

"Anytime you want to have a conversation with an employee in a secretive, one-off manner, that's never a good idea," Yates said. "Something smells bad about that."

Next week, the broadcast networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and the CW — will make their upfront presentations in New York. (There are some scattered cable ones too, like ESPN and TNT/TBS.) This is where they present their new shows, in the form of clips and sizzle reels, to advertisers. From a business perspective, it's really important in the same way that any sales pitch is really important: they sell ads, they make money, and when they get the advertising people excited, a show becomes a presumed frontrunner before it even premieres. (This happened a couple of years ago with 2 Broke Girls.)

But it's become the collective moment in which we seem to decide we are looking ahead to next season, and while that's perfectly fine, I beg you: do not take this week too much to heart.

There are people who are gangbusters at writing up the business side of all this, who understand scheduling and executive shuffles and love to dive into who's making money and who's not and why, who have an encyclopedic knowledge of producers and players. (My favorites are Joe Adalian at Vulture and Lacey Rose and Lesley Goldberg at The Hollywood Reporter.) They're a lot of fun to pay attention to about now, because they're dealing with this as the Hollywood inside baseball that it is.

For critics, though, there's a sort of imperative to treat this as the official Preview Of What We'll All Be Talking About For The Next Six Months, and that's unnecessary for a few reasons.

First of all, the fact that this is a broadcast-centric event means that while it does provide a list of some of what will be on offer, it doesn't do so with any particular thoroughness. What five networks do in September has less and less of a stranglehold on the entire idea of television, both because things premiere all year and because everybody from The Weather Channel to Netflix to XBox is making shows. It's not at all uncommon for the highest viewership numbers on a particular night to be a motley mix of network shows and cable shows, and so few people are pulling in television over the air at this point that for your average person with at least basic cable, it's fair to ask who really cares about this particular constellation of folks?

Furthermore, it's so early in the creative development of all these projects that nobody really knows what they might turn into. What the networks are going to show during their official presentations aren't even pilots — they're just sizzle reels, which is a more finger-guns-shooting way of saying "trailers," which is in turn a more cinematic way to say "long commercials." You cannot tell literally anything from the vast majority of sizzle reels, except that in some cases, you can tell that comedies are thus far terrible and not funny. It's like trying to judge a house by the doorknob; you can try to extrapolate, but it's an awful lot of effort for minimal reward.

And finally, so much of this stuff is going to disappear so quickly that the minutes you spend even developing the pre-awareness of its existence that networks are trying to drum into you beginning right now is going to be largely wasted. There will be countless critics — including me! — making recommendations later about what to try and what not to try, but at this point ... well, let's put it this way: two years ago right now, Fox was very into The Mindy Project, but also The Mob Doctor and Ben And Kate. (These were television shows.) Last year at this time, We Are Men was a going concern. Not even! It was a concern yet to come. Remember Back In The Game? Welcome To The Family? Betrayal? Lucky 7? Blair Underwood in a remake of Ironside? There are, in fact, things that were announced last year at upfronts, were previewed by critics, have yet to air, and have already been canceled.

I'm not saying don't check out the rundowns from critics you like, or don't let buzz seep into your soul; there are times when it turns out to be right, and heaven knows that curating for yourself is enough work at this point that you need all the help you can get. We'll talk about upfronts here, too — it's what we do.

Just don't get too attached to anything. Don't get emotionally invested. This is very much a production of Ye Olde Television Model, which — don't get me wrong — remains the way most people watch much of their television, but which is only a teeny piece of the picture of the conversations that will be going on six months from now.

Be advised.

While at least one of their number has said House Democrats should boycott the new select committee created by Speaker John Boehner to further investigate the 2012 Benghazi, Libya, attack that left four Americans dead, other Democrats aren't yet willing to go that far.

True, Democrats consider it a GOP election-year political stunt. They see it as as a Boehner attempt to mollify conservatives after he mocked them on immigration legislation, one which would excite the Republican base, keep the White House on its heels and muddy up Hillary Clinton in advance of 2016.

But while boycotting the select committee, as California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff has suggested, might de-legitimize the panel, it would also give Republicans an open road to deliver whatever messages they wanted without any immediate Democratic interference. That approach presents obvious problems.

That helps explain why Democrats generally haven't decided yet what their next move will be. Instead, they're putting the onus on Republicans. First, they want to see if Republicans will meet Democratic definitions of fairness as laid down Tuesday by Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

"If this review is to be fair, it must be truly bipartisan," Pelosi said in a statement. "The panel should be equally divided between Democrats and Republicans as is done on the House Ethics Committee. It should require that witnesses are called and interviewed, subpoenas are issued, and information is shared on a bipartisan basis. Only then could it be fair."

House Republicans were quick to point out that in 2007, shortly after Democrats assumed House control, Pelosi named a select committee on global warming that wasn't equally balanced but tilted 9 to 6 in Democrats' favor. The message to Pelosi seemed clear: it's payback time.

A Boehner spokesman didn't return a request for comment for this post.

House Democrats will, by and large, vote against the Benghazi panel when it formally comes to a floor vote — expected Thursday.

There could be a few defections on the vote but for the most part Democrats are saying they don't think the investigation by the new committee, to be chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., will accomplish anything more than the probe by the existing House Oversight and Investigations Committee under its chairman, California Rep. Darrell Issa.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on that committee, made just that point:

"This new select committee appears to be nothing more than a reaction to internal Republican bickering rather than a responsible effort to obtain the facts, especially since the new committee will not have any powers that Chairman Issa doesn't have already—including the ability to issue unilateral subpoenas for any document or any witness, which he just used to subpoena ... Secretary of State (John Kerry)," he said in a statement.

The new select committee was in part a response to a White House aide's email dating to the days after the Benghazi attack — which only recently emerged as the result of a conservative group's freedom of information request.

The email from Ben Rhodes, a White House national security official, didn't really reveal much more than what was already out there: that, during an election year, the White House was concerned about shaping the public perception about the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

But it was enough to give new momentum to Republicans who sought the latest probe.

The White House isn't advising House Democrats, at least not publicly, on whether to participate on the panel. But White House press secretary Jay Carney leaves no doubt that the administration's preference would be for congressional Republicans to move on from Benghazi.

"It's pretty blatantly apparent, based on what they've said and what even other Republicans have said, that this is a highly partisan exercise. But I'm not going to go further than that," Carney told journalists Monday. "We leave it up to Leader Pelosi and Democrats on the Hill to decide how they want to approach this."

There are 46 million poor people in the U.S., and millions more hover right above the poverty line — but go into many of their homes and you might find a flat screen TV, a computer or the latest sneakers.

And that raises a question: What does it mean to be poor in America today?

Take Victoria Houser, a 22-year-old single mother who lives in Painted Post, a small town in western New York. At first glance, her life doesn't look all that bad. She lives in a cozy two-bedroom apartment. She has food, furniture and toys for her almost two-year-old son, Brayden. He even likes playing a game called Fruit Ninja on her electronic tablet.

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