It’s no secret health care costs are on the rise. But it’s not just employees who are feeling the pain of high out of pocket costs. The impact of higher premiums are also affecting employers whose costs for employee health benefits become an even bigger line item within their annual budgets.
As a plan sponsor, you may be wondering how you can achieve greater savings in healthcare costs for your company. When it comes to evaluating premiums for employee health benefits, businesses have more options to stabilize health care costs than they may think.
And it starts with having an employee health benefits partner, like NPPG, you can trust.
Find a Trusted Employee Health Benefits Partner to Help You Evaluate Health Premiums
As a trusted employee health benefits partner for plan sponsors, HR professionals and business owners, NPPG strives to become your go-to resource to help minimize the rising costs of healthcare premiums.
Stabilizing the cost of health insurance remains a challenge for employers as they seek to achieve the most value from their programs. One way to address premium increases and stay competitive as an employer is to analyze utilization and plan design.
Benchmark Your Employee Health Benefits Plans
Out of pocket cost for copays, deductibles, coinsurance, prescription, out-of-pocket maximum, copay for x-rays, emergency room visits, etc., all have a direct impact on the overall cost of company sponsored benefits. Some of these costs can be controlled by benchmarking data with other companies. So, find out how your business measures up.
It is important to benchmark data to be able to compare your plan to other companies that you compete with for top talent.
Factors to benchmark include:
- Demographics
- Average annual cost for employees
- Average monthly employee contributions to premium
- Deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, out-of-pocket maximums, etc.
Understand Data and Analyze Claims
While there will always be unavoidable circumstances, many consumers are unaware of the actual costs of medical procedures. For example, many emergency room visits are not actually emergencies at all and can be treated more efficiently and at a greatly reduced cost, at a participants primary care physician’s office or an urgent care facility. Emergency room visits could cost $1,200 or more and take several hours before the patient is treated. Unnecessary visits to the ER drive the cost of health insurance up for both the participant and employer.
NPPG takes the time to analyze claims and loss ratios, evaluate current plan data, and design a plan that fits your business and employees unique needs and overall goals. In addition, we also provide an in depth educational program for employees to help them understand benefits offerings, costs of services and empower them to make educated decisions.
When analyzing employee health benefits in a large group setting (over 100 employees), we take into consideration all available data. The following enables us to benchmark your plan and sets the foundation to creating a comprehensive market analysis:
- Review claims and loss ratios quarterly if you are experience-rated.
- Maintain a rolling 24 months of information and a history of all plan changes.
- Compare actual experience to prior renewal projections.
- Request renewal projections from your carrier.
- Analyze claims data to find cost-saving opportunities for your plan.
Northeast Professional Planning for Employee Health Benefits
NPPG provides a full range of employee benefits planning services, including comprehensive health benefits planning and design, Affordable Care Act compliance, comparative market analysis, employee enrollment and ongoing education, health and welfare plan document compliance and other integrated employer services.
Our experts manage the entire scope of plan administration offering customized solutions for clients to help balance costs while accommodating unique plan requests.
For further information, contact Northeast Professional Planning Group, Inc. corporate office in Red Bank, NJ at (732) 758-1577.