[Ed. Note: This is a guest post from Nancy-Ann DeParle, Director at the Office of Health Reform and Counselor to the President, in response to comments from the health care community on LinkedIn regarding the challenges faced by health care professionals in their state]
Thank you for joining the discussion and sharing your thoughts on the health care challenges in your state. The President understands those challenges and has made it clear that health insurance reform must bring stability and security to Americans who have insurance today, provide affordable coverage to those who don’t, and lower the cost of health care to help our families, businesses, and government.
Many of the comments you posted online are similar to those we have heard from doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and other medical professionals across the county. You see firsthand the problems with our health care system – what happens when patients cannot receive the care they need because an insurance company has decided to drop or water down coverage, or when individuals do not have check-ups or preventive screenings because insurance companies do not cover them or they are uninsured. Dr. Joel commented that “our focus needs to shift to strategies of prevention and include incentives for healthier lifestyles.”
Some of you expressed concern about rising health costs. You are right. The rising cost of health care in this country is unsustainable. We are now spending roughly one in every six dollars on health care. If we do nothing, in 30 years, one out of every three dollars in our economy will be tied up in the health care system. Melissa S wrote that “my biggest concern is the cost associated with health plans.” Health care costs are rising more than three times faster than wages, and premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance for family coverage have risen 131 percent in the last ten years and went up five percent this year alone. One of the central goals of the President’s plan is to slow the growth rate of health care spending that is crushing families, businesses, and governments. Health insurance reform will accomplish this by increasing competition in the insurance market, wringing waste and fraud out of Medicare and Medicaid, and working to change our health care priorities to emphasize quality of care rather than quantity of services. Health insurance reform will limit what you have to pay out-of-pocket for health care and will do away with annual and lifetime caps on coverage.
Others wrote about patients who cannot move or change jobs because they have a pre-existing condition or simply cannot afford coverage on the expensive private insurance market. Dr. Anje V discussed “patients who have lost their insurance due to job loss.” Under the President’s plan, Americans will have the security of knowing they have options. People who are uninsured or are forced to seek coverage on today’s expensive individual market will be able to find affordable plans in the insurance exchange, a marketplace where you can shop for what is right for you. Insurance companies will no longer be allowed to deny you coverage because you have a pre-existing condition, and they will be prohibited from cancelling your coverage when you get sick.
Several of you – including Frank W, a neuroradiology fellow – expressed concerns about the medical liability system. As part of the Administration’s ongoing effort to reform our health care system, we have listened to the concerns many have raised about the need to improve patient safety and to reform our medical liability system. President Obama recently directed Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to move forward immediately on an initiative to give states and health care systems the opportunity to apply for demonstration projects on medical liability consistent with certain goals and core commitments. You can read more about these demonstration grants here.
We appreciate the contributions of doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and other medical professionals around the country. You are on the front lines of the health care system and see every day how the problems with the current system are impacting you, your patients, and their families. Thank you for joining this discussion, and we look forward to hearing from you again.
We’d also like this to be the start of an ongoing conversation through the LinkedIn Group we’ve started for this purpose. Please continue sharing your valuable thoughts, comments and feedback here.
[Ed. note: We're taking a break from the usual format of guest posts to include Q&A posts such as these. This is the first in the series and is a conversation that Jose Mallabo from LinkedIn had with Ajay Jain, author of “Let’s Connect: Using LinkedIn to get ahead at work” when he was over in India recently]
During a market intelligence gathering trip to Mumbai and Delhi, I was fortunate enough to grab a cup of coffee with Ajay Jain, one of India’s more prolific bloggers and author of several travel and social networking books. Needless to say, I listened and learned a ton about social networking in India. Below is a synopsis of our chat in Gurgaon (southwest of Delhi) last week.
JM: I just met with a bunch of Indian PR firms and almost all of them pointed to you as the most influential blogger on social media in India.
AJ: (Big smile and shrug) It’s probably because of my book on LinkedIn and a couple of columns I wrote in the media here. My new travel book goes to print today.
JM: That’s great. What the heck are you doing here with me then?
AJ: Well, it’s done so there’s not much to do today other than promote it. It’s a pictorial travelogue of my trip through Ladakh, a high altitude Himalayan region bordering Tibet and Pakistan. Travelling has become a key agenda in my life; I need to get away from the cacophony of big cities and the rat race forced upon all of us. Call it social ‘un-networking’ – or seeking opportunities to make friends with even those who have never seen a computer.
JM: Send me an InMail on how to buy it and I’ll check it out. You’re kind of living the dream. I don’t know many people who wouldn’t want to make a living as a blogger and travel writer.
AJ: (Bigger smile, laughter) I have a long waiting list of those wanting to assist me. But this option does not come with guaranteed pay checks I tell them.
JM: In all your talks and trainings on how to use social media and LinkedIn, what have you found is the most interesting use or issue with it in India?
AJ: Recruiters seem to be most active here, but they tend to rely more on Introductions and InMails to get through to candidates. Just to save a few advertising dollars, they often tend to be irksome. Some LinkedIn users don’t seem to realize the value of interacting on the site just like they would in the real world. You can play the fool on MySpace and Facebook if you choose to, but LinkedIn is all about real people, with real identities out to conduct serious business.
Indian users also tend to get suddenly active when they have a need. This can sometimes be seen as selfish behavior. You have to nurture relationships over time to get the most out of your contacts. It’s back to what we should be doing in the real world.
A cultural trait is worth mentioning here: Indians are generally happier to socialize and talk in person. We are not very keen on written communication which often comes in the way of meaningful engagement on social media and blogs. And unlike the West, we have an overdose of people socializing with us including family, friends and colleagues. For many Indians, we want social isolation rather than more networking.
JM: What is a common misconception you hear about India and social media?
AJ: It may sound strange in the American context, but you may need to go a little offline. And organize some face to face meets with users in India to drive home value of LinkedIn, what they should be doing and how to conduct themselves. It will require a bit of effort, but the same thing documented and sent electronically won’t resonate. Again, Indians tend to ask and figure things out rather than read any manuals or books explaining the same point better.
JM: Which is exactly why I flew 9,000 miles to see you, right?
AJ: Well, you could have just emailed me!
Ajay will be hosting a fireside chat with Deep Nishar, vice president of product development at LinkedIn, at IIT Bombay on September 23.
Thanks to the thousands of small business owners and professionals for submitting your questions to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) through LinkedIn Answers on some of the most important issues you’re dealing with around health care. We appreciate the thoughtfulness and passion with which you’ve crafted these questions.
Given below are the questions from LinkedIn’s small business community that were answered by the CEA. Check out a more detailed response to these questions in the video above:
1. How will the current health care proposals level the playing field so small businesses can effectively compete with large corporations for human capital?
- Abraham Jankans, President & CEO at LaunchPad Careers Inc. (Los Angeles)
2. How will you make health care affordable and available to small business? What about co-ops, affordable rates and inclusion of pre-existing conditions?
- from Kyra Cavanaugh, President of Life Meets Work Inc. (Chicago)
Kyra’s commentary:
For so many of us who’ve left jobs in corporate America with great health benefits to forge our own path through entrepreneurship, our families are left to suffer with sub-standard insurance and inclusion in the class of under-insured Americans.
3. How will you improve competition in health care, to allow for more competitive health plans, and what with this plan to do promote a more health environment through wellness?
- from A.J. Vazquez III, Founding Partner, AJV-Attorneys at Law (Miami)
A.J.’s commentary:
Affordability and availability. A small business owner should have a competitive selection of comparable health plans to choose from. As a small business owner taking care of my people is important to me. Creating an environment that focuses on wellness is a priority at my law firm. Healthy, productive employees are not only great for your company but is ultimately great for their respective families and our communities at large. It’s a win – win situation in the end that’s well worth the effort.
4. How did we get from providing insurance as a benefit, to the “requirement” that businesses provide insurance?
- from Marc Young, President at Zantech, Inc (watch repair company in Peoria, Illinois)
Marc’s commentary:
If we recognize that there are three basic tiers in the health care issue. Tier one – the providers (doctors, hospitals), this is where the “cost factors” begin. Many providers do not post their prices and they are not generally required or incented to be competitive with real cost hidden by the other Tiers; Tier two – the insurance companies, help to hide these costs and tack on their own costs as well as profits they earn; and Tier three – business that provide health coverage, although not directly adding to the cost of healthcare must increase their prices to generate more profits to cover the costs passed on to them from Tiers 1 and 2 less whatever recovery of costs they can get from their employee base. Since Insurance was never intended to be a perk but rather to be a necessary component of running a business, provided to compete for better employees.
5. Is making small businesses responsible for providing health care simply giving a competitive advantage to big businesses? Why not start with Tort reform and mandating insurers to cover pre-existing conditions with all policies being full portable, regardless of state, company or position?
- from Donald Rossberg, President of Dataworks, Inc. (IT consulting firm in Kansas City, Missouri)
To read more questions submitted by our users over the past week (over 1500 submissions), please go here.
As I’ve voiced before, small businesses are critical to our economy. On LinkedIn, over 12 million of you own or work at a small business. That’s why we’ve teamed up with the White House to make sure your voice is heard.
Today in his weekly address, President Barack Obama focused on health care for small businesses and announced that the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) just released a report on The Economic Impact of Health Insurance on Small Businesses and their Employees. The report highlights the essential role of small businesses in our economy and calls for health care reform to reduce the burdens that the current system place on them.
The President is asking for your feedback. CEA Chair Christina Romer has posed a question on LinkedIn to engage in a dialogue with the small business community. She will be addressing your comments and questions in a live online video chat this coming Wednesday. We urge you to take part in this important dialogue and share your expertise and insights with our policy makers.
Jeff Weiner has updated his profile from President to CEO of LinkedIn.
Six months ago, Jeff started at LinkedIn running our day-to-day operations as President of the company. During that time we’ve achieved record operating and financial results. Prior to LinkedIn, Jeff was an Executive in Residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Previously, he spent over seven years in key leadership roles at Yahoo!, managing businesses and products that reached over half a billion consumers worldwide. Jeff’s experience building multiple products on a global scale is highly relevant to LinkedIn and will be critical as we continue to grow the LinkedIn professional network around the world.
I look forward to working with Jeff as he leads the company. He and I share the same vision for Linkedin: connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. In the new world of work, every professional should establish their own brand online; every professional engages their network in order to connect with the people and information they need to compete and succeed.
While Jeff leads the company, I will focus on some big picture strategic issues for Linkedin – how Linkedin evolves to become more and more essential to professionals seeking to stay informed and find the right resources to accomplish their tasks fast and effectively.
We’re very excited about Jeff’s role as CEO, leading the company towards helping all professionals become connected and successful.
On Cinco de Mayo, we celebrated our 6th birthday AND welcomed our 40 millionth member to the LinkedIn network! With two great reasons to celebrate, employees invited their families to come to the office for an afternoon fiesta. There were popsicles and margaritas, pin the tail on the donkey and a scavenger hunt, cupcakes and tacos, mini sombreros and big fun for adults and kids alike!
As we celebrate success, we keep top of mind the importance of supporting our community. For this event, we partnered with the Bring Me A Book Foundation who provides libraries of high quality children’s books and read aloud workshops to under served communities. Did you know reading aloud to children at an early age is the single most important activity for building eventual success in reading AND two-thirds of all low-income families and most low-income childcare centers and preschools have zero age-appropriate books? Yes, that’s a zero!
Employees graciously donated over $1,400 dollars to donate two bookcases for local pre-schools in Mountain View! Keeping with our fiesta theme, the bookcases will be bilingual with Spanish and English books. Thanks to Bring Me A Book for all the fabulous work they do throughout the year and for partnering with us.
Thanks to Alice’s Restaurant for catering the food & drinks and to Kara’s Cupcakes in Palo Alto for providing 600 yummy mini cupcakes…if you haven’t had the banana caramel you should definitely try it – it was our favorite!
Thanks to all our members, our employees and their families for another great year! Olé!
Check out the rest of the pictures taken at the birthday party here
40 million members strong in 6 years, almost to the date! Its always fun to look back down memory lane, and what a year its been! Yours truly has been here for almost a couple of years, so I thought I’d give you a little perspective on some of the milestones we’ve crossed in the past year compared to the first 5 years:
First 5 years
In the last year
Members
22,000,000
40,000,000+
User Groups
50,000+
300,000+
Languages
1
4
Applications
0
11
Answers
1,000,000
2,000,000+
As you might guess from the chart above, we’ve spent the last year building functionality that help you: create, connect, and collaborate with your connections. A few key highlights from the past year:
• Group discussions
• LinkedIn Applications
• LinkedIn in Spanish
• LinkedIn in French
• LinkedIn In German
• Direct Ads
• LinkedIn Polls
• Company Profiles
• All new LinkedIn People Search
• LinkedIn iPhone app
This past year wasn’t just a success for LinkedIn, but even more importantly for our users as well:
• “About a week later, I was offered an amazing job at Microsoft in Boston, and it wouldn’t have happened without LinkedIn.” - Adam Conrad: future Microsoft employee
• “Within the first week, a former client responded and we connected. Out of that came aa $1 million consulting contract, just because we were able to connect and remember.” – Darrel Rhea: CEO, Cheskin
We’re looking forward to another great year. What will the future bring? Only time will tell, but we here at LinkedIn look forward to building it with you – our users.
Check out how some of our user success stories here
[Ed.note: This is a guest post by Scott Case, CEO of Malaria No More - a non-profit, non-governmental organization that aims to end deaths caused by malaria. Today is World Malaria Day and here are Scott's thoughts on the epidemic and what we can do to help fight it]
Over the past week, Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million Twitter followers showed the incredible power of new technologies and social networks to get a message out—and in this case, to help end malaria. Ashton leveraged his following on Twitter to raise awareness about malaria and drive donations to Malaria No More. But in today’s world of online communities, each of us has the same digital tools at our disposal to beat malaria. Each of us has the potential to influence our networks.
Networks open doors to the best expertise, to essential technology, and to financial resources that have a huge impact. We know that malaria can be stopped with simple tools like medicines, indoor sprays and mosquito nets. Momentum is building to end malaria deaths by 2015 – an ambitious goal, but achievable. As I mentioned earlier, it just requires the power of your network.
To commemorate World Malaria Day today, I’m asking the LinkedIn network for help. My question to you is:
How can you use your expertise and networks to help the malaria community?
- increase public awareness in donor nations and in Africa
- advocate for political support around the world and especially in Africa
- make leveraged investments in Africa that help save lives
Click here to answer my question, and then continue the conversation in our LinkedIn group, Linked To End Malaria. The group provides a forum for us to mobilize hundreds or (maybe) thousands of professionals in our networks to make a difference in the fight against malaria. There you can share your ideas, collaborate and take action with others who refuse to accept another death from malaria.
Ashton proved the power of his network with one million followers – let’s find out what the LinkedIn community can do with 40 million professionals.
From the day we launched, LinkedIn has been about helping professionals build and maintain trusted relationships online. Over the past six years, we’ve seen millions of professionals gravitate towards this concept and members are signing up for LinkedIn in unprecedented numbers.
Today over 37 million professionals on LinkedIn believe that bringing our real-world professional relationships online will help all of us work smarter. While the network grows rapidly, we want to make sure that we preserve the user experience – for every user – by maintaining the integrity of the site. Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that a very small number of users tarnish the experience for some members of our community.
This extremely limited but abusive behavior violates our Terms of Service. This includes examples such as not using a real name/person as the profile owner, falsifying info, creating fake profiles, trying to use someone else’s account, massively inviting people they don’t know, and using the data in a way not authorized or intended by LinkedIn’s Terms of Service. This behavior, though infrequent, strikes at the very root of a trusted professional network.
We take these violations very seriously and will not tolerate this behavior. We’ll be contacting these users with a warning and any subsequent violation will result in the restriction or the termination of their account.
Moving forward, we’ll continue responding to complaints of abuses. We’ve also created an email address for you to report inappropriate behavior. Please email us, should you notice abusive behavior on LinkedIn.
And thanks for making LinkedIn a great network of professionals. We really appreciate it.
Since the start of the recession in December 2007, millions of jobs have been lost both in the US as well as globally, easily exceeding any previous downturn in the last half a century. While finding jobs is one piece of the equation, getting a job is most closely related to successful professional networking and that’s where LinkedIn can help.
We are focused on helping our members leverage their LinkedIn profile and business relationships to uncover these new opportunities whenever, wherever. A case in point is the partnership we announced with Right Management, the largest global provider of outplacement solutions. Integrating LinkedIn’s functionality and networking capabilities with Right Management services allows job seekers the ability to maintain a competitive edge in this challenging economic environment by leveraging their LinkedIn network while they look for a job.
If you’re using Right Management’s outplacement services, in this challenging job market, their career consultants will work with you to develop your LinkedIn profile to showcase your expertise and provide you with specialized training to ensure the benefits of LinkedIn are fully maximized in your job hunt.
We love to hear from you. So feel free to comment, but keep in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc. All comments are moderated.
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[Ed. Note: This is a guest post from Nancy-Ann DeParle, Director at the Office of Health Reform and Counselor to the President, in response to comments from the health care community on LinkedIn regarding the challenges faced by health care professionals in their state]
[Ed. note: This is a guest post by 
