Jennifer Williams

So there are a couple of things that are pushing health care costs up for companies.

There are just higher prices for care.

There's expanding use of services and then pricey prescriptions, including GLP-1s used for both weight loss and diabetes.

Typical tactics used to lower health care costs for employers include like changing plan designs, negotiating lower costs with vendors, and pushing some of those costs on to employees.

But right now, given how high the costs are and that it's expected to stay that way, experts are saying that executives are considering more significant action

like self-insurance or more aggressively managing their prescription costs.

And that's particularly where the GLP-1 consideration comes in.

What I first heard from Costco last December is that their costs had increased more significantly and at a faster pace than sales, which was not something they tend to see.

I spoke with someone who works at a nonprofit consumer healthcare advocacy organization about the trade-offs that employees are also having to make, which is as extreme as, do I buy my groceries or do I go see a doctor or buy prescriptions for my kids?

I'm a shopaholic and I'm doing no by January.

So here are my rules.

I'm not buying new clothes just because something is trendy.

Hello, this is Jennifer Williams, program manager at the Scottish Poetry Library, and I'm really pleased to be sitting across from the American poet Brian Turner.

Brian is here in particular at the Stanza Poetry Festival, which is just coming up in a few days, and

actually by the time you hear this it probably will have happened already but we're so delighted that we're getting to talk to Brian and would like to say that this is recorded in association with Stanza Scotland's International Poetry Festival and would have been recorded at Stanza 2014 but due to some scheduling issues and the lucky coincidence that Brian happened to be in the poetry library today we're just going to go ahead and do it today so that's fabulous Brian is a poet and essayist and a professor

He won the 2005 Beatrice Holley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet.

And that was the first of many awards and honors for that collection, which got quite a lot of attention, I think, in the press.

And his honors since include a Lennon Literary Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowe Poetry Traveling Scholarship, all sorts of wonderful awards.

His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S.

Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise.