If you’re an employer, health insurance benefits can be a major factor for employee attraction and retention. Since 50% of employees say they’d leave their current company for a similar position with better benefits, you’re at risk of losing your top-performing talent if you don’t offer enticing and fulfilling health insurance benefits. This is where an innovative solution like a transparent health insurance plan comes into play.
What is a Transparent Health Insurance Plan, and How Does it Help My Employees?
For companies unfamiliar with a transparent health insurance plan, you’re not alone. So many employers are used to the Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) model offered by a traditional broker. While this model may have worked in the past, rising healthcare costs, manipulation of medical billing and overcharging from hospitals have made it an expensive, wasteful model that ultimately hurts your employees–sometimes even more than it helps.
A transparent health insurance plan, on the other hand, removes the provider network (and the costs and charges associated with a traditional broker) and allows members to choose the providers they’d like to see instead. Transparent plans also evaluate each claim before they get in front of an employee, catching any erroneous charges from a hospital billing department and potentially saving employees thousands of dollars.
Here are six tips to show your employees you care about them with the health insurance plan you offer.
Tip #1: Save Employees Money by Lowering Their Deductible
A deductible, or the amount your employees must pay out of pocket before their health insurance takes over medical costs, can be a significant hit to finances if it’s too high. Since a transparent health insurance plan eliminates opportunities for overcharging from a provider network and broker, this will lead to a lower deductible for employees. They don’t have to pay to make up the charges from a broker and instead know their money is going towards affordable, efficient health care. In fact, at ClearChain Health, our members often experience an average of a 20% lower deductible.
Tip #2: Protect Employees’ Paychecks by Lowering Their Contribution
If you’re an employee, how much of your paycheck do you pay towards your health insurance plan? What would you do with that money if you could pocket it instead? With a transparent health insurance plan, it’s very likely you can.
Just like lowering your deductible, choosing to work with a broker committed to transparency and not maintaining a PPO lowers your contribution. For example, our members at ClearChain Health enjoy 10% lower employee contributions on average than what they paid with a traditional broker.
Tip #3: Include Employee Feedback in Choosing and Maintaining a Plan
If you’re an employee, how often has your employer switched benefit plans without first consulting employees like yourself? If you’re paying a significant amount of money for a plan that doesn’t even meet your needs, you likely feel frustrated, unappreciated and discontent with your employer.
If you’re an employer, you may have the best intentions when switching brokers. However, without the valuable feedback and data directly from your employees, how can you truly know what they need and want in their benefits? Take the time to collect their honest feedback, comments and even criticism. Making them feel like their voice matters goes a long way.
Tip #4: Eliminate Unfair Pricing in Medical Billing
A cornerstone of a transparent health insurance plan is closely auditing each claim before the employee even sees the bill. This means than your employees are protected from paying any unfair or fraudulent charges from hospital billing departments, like unbundled CPT codes. Your employees will save money on their bills and have more money to put towards other expenses.
Tip #5: Offer Extras by Reinvesting the Money You Save
As your transparent health insurance plan lowers costs for both the company and employees, there will likely be opportunities to reinvest saved monies into extra benefits for employees. For example, maybe your transparent broker can offer no-cost refills for generic prescriptions, or employees and their families can enjoy no-cost routine visits to their doctors’ offices.
Tip #6: Provide Employees the Freedom to See Who They Want
If you have a traditional PPO plan, you’re no stranger to the frustration of finding a healthcare provider you’d love to see–only to discover that they aren’t covered in your network. A transparent health insurance plan allows members the freedom to see whoever they want without restrictions or out-of-network penalty fees. Members simply nominate their provider to participate in their health insurance plan, and their insurance handles the rest.
Need Help Building a Transparent Health Insurance Plan?
ClearChain Health specializes in creating unique plans for our member groups that utilize a direct relationship between employees, their healthcare providers and their health insurance. By eliminating a PPO network and auditing each claim, members have the freedom to choose who they want to see and save up to 30% on their out-of-pocket healthcare costs. Learn more about our model and contact us today!