The newspaper explains this new word better than I could. (I've simplified the quotation.)

quote:

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In the game of hot potato that health insurance has become, employers and insurers keep trying to pass rising health costs to each other. Now insurers are using a tacctic called "lasering," which shiftes the costs of the sickest workers back into the lap of employers.

Typically, self-insured employers -- under which a company pays most of its employee medical bills -- contract with stop-loss, or reinsurance, carriers to pay catastrophic claims. This protects an employer form being hit with a single medical bill that could wreak havoc on its health plan. But as employers seek to renew their stop-loss coverage, reinsurance companies are lasering, or carving out, severely ill employess from coverage. [Note: that leaves the cost on the employer, not the employee.]

For instance, Itron Inc. has an employee whose medical bills have been high, $175,000 this year. The company pays its employees' claims and, for most employees, is reimbursed by its reinsurer to the extent an employee's annual claims exceed $100,000. But for that employee, the reinsurance agreement has a $250,000 figure instead of $100,000.

By agreeing two years ago to laser out its seriously ill employee, the company was able to keep its reinsurance premium from doubling.

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Then the company is self-insured on this one employee?