This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Boucher with my colleague, Gene Marks, and we're

looking at small business. Small businesses, the business of America and health costs

are everything, but they're also a major piece of how you can attract and retain workers.

And Gene very carefully writes about this often, but now we come to the street reporting

about small and medium-sized employers converting to self-insured health plan. Is that going

to save a money, Jane?

Yeah, it is. So I've been talking about this recently, too, and I wrote about it months

ago, but I'm going to revisit the topic. It used to be, John, that self-insurance plans

were something for the big boys, large corporations that pulled their money together so that they

could negotiate better healthcare rates, and they have the capability to absorb any losses,

but also to take advantage of the upsides of doing that. But over the past few years,

there has been a significant growth in small businesses getting involved in self-insuring

for their health costs. If you're listening to this and you run a small business or you're

managing a business, you want to look into captive insurance programs. There are captive

insurance companies all around the country, and many of them are sprouting up to support

small businesses because they've realized that there is good economics involved. A captive

insurance program, John, it's a separate entity that might have a thousand businesses

that belong to it. So you're in business with a bunch of other people, but that entity

is run by experienced people in the healthcare industry, and they're representing tens of

thousands of employees that are based on their members. They go out and they negotiate

and buy health insurance, and if you're a small business now, they figured out this formula

for self-insuring so that you're sharing the loss of so many other small and mid-sized

...