Blogs of the LA Area Chamber

I am in Washington, D.C. this week with more than 170 elected officials, business and civic leaders for the Chamber’s annual ACCESS Washington, D.C. advocacy trip, so I decided to share with you an April 21 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by former editor and columnist Jim Newton. The Chamber actively supports the subject of this op-ed: the Southern California International Gateway.

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On May 3, the Chamber will celebrate the 90th annual World Trade Week Kickoff Breakfast. This event, attended by 600 community and international leaders, ignites a month of activities highlighting the importance of global trade to families and businesses in Southern California. This year’s breakfast will feature Alan F. Horn, chairman of The Walt Disney Studios, as well as special appearances by Congressman Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. The breakfast will include the presentation of the prestigious Stanley T. Olafson Award for promotion of international trade to Ilse Metchek, president of the California Fashion Association and Fred Latuperissa, director of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Southern California Inland Empire office.

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Rising cost-sharing for people with health insurance has drawn a good deal of public attention in recent years.  For example, the average deductible for people with employer-provided health coverage rose from $303 to $1,077 between 2006 and 2015.

While we can get a sense of employees’ potential exposure to out-of-pocket costs by looking at trends in deductibles, many employees will never reach their deductibles and other employees may have costs that far exceed their deductibles.  In addition to deductible payments, some employees also have copayments (set dollar amounts for a given service) or coinsurance payments (a percentage of the allowed amount for the service).  To look at what workers and their families actually spend out-of-pocket for services covered by their employer-sponsored plan, we analyzed a sample of health benefit claims from the Truven MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters Database to calculate the average amounts paid toward deductibles, copayments and coinsurance.

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Two weeks from today, more than 150 business and civic leaders from Los Angeles County will be in Washington, D.C. to advocate for our region. We’ll be joined by City of L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, members of the L.A. City Council, LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King and Board President Steve Zimmer, and elected officials from Glendale, South Bay and West Hollywood. On the agenda will be legislation to improve our economy, transportation, energy, housing, health care, technology, education and workforce development.

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Yesterday, Governor Brown and legislative leaders gathered in Los Angeles to sign a bill raising California's minimum wage to $15 an hour - the highest in the country - by 2022. While discussions had been ongoing in the Capitol about a compromise to ward off two competing ballot measures for the November election, the language in the bill that was signed yesterday did not exist two weeks ago.

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