The uncertainty in today’s healthcare legislation may cause your HR department—and your benefits broker—to scramble in trying to minimize costs as premiums continue to rise. According to the Los Angeles Times, California officials are even reporting “that monthly premiums for health plans sold on the state’s Obamacare exchange could rise by an average of 12.5%”.
While trying to stay within budget may be nerve-wracking in today’s climate of legislative uncertainty, the key is finding cost-effective workplace benefits that still provide high-quality solutions to your employees and improve productivity. Read on to learn how you can work with your benefits broker to create a plan, overcome uncertainty, and offset increased costs.
Overcome Legislative Uncertainty With Cost-Effective Providers
No one knows what’s going to happen with the future of Obamacare, or the American Health Care Act—the Trump administration’s replacement bill for Obamacare. And unfortunately, it’s resulted in providers such as Anthem and Blue Cross pulling out of the market due to the increasing lack of predictability and fear of unsustainable losses to their companies.
Because of this lack of predictability, health care providers don’t know if they’ll be able to count on their profit anymore, so they’re constantly raising their costs – which are passed onto companies like yours who provide health benefits to employees. If your company plans to overcome the legislative uncertainty and rising costs of health care providers, it’s time to put a plan into place to assess how your efforts should be focused moving forward.
Review Your Current Benefits Plan
Now is the time to tap into your broker as a resource to assess your needs. After you get your broker on board, you can start reviewing your current workplace benefits plan. Begin making a list of your current employee benefits. Mentally or physically jot down the resources you believe your employees are or are not utilizing, and then move onto the actual analysis.
Analyze the Effectiveness
You can now analyze and see what is working for your company, and what isn’t. Are there any benefits you’re offering employees that aren’t being used? For example: Let’s say you’re providing Benefit A to your employees at a $0.90/employee cost to your company. However, there’s one huge caveat: Your employees are very rarely utilizing this benefit.
In this situation, you can offset these unnecessary costs by removing this benefit and replacing it with a more cost-effective program that you know your employees actually need.
Find New Options That are Best Suited for Your Company
After you and your broker have reviewed your current benefits plan, analyzed the effectiveness and inquired on your employee’s current needs, you can move onto finding plans best suited for your company. This is where you’ll ask questions like: What’s our company’s budget? What are the needs of my employee demographics? Which programs are easily implemented?
The answers to these questions will provide your company with a much more focused, clear picture of where you’ll need to go with your new and improved workplace benefits package to overcome legislative uncertainty. Luckily, finding a cost-effective provider to cater to your employee’s needs and minimize complications is simple when you know what to look for.
With 10,000 people turning 65 every day for the next 13 years, it’s likely your employees need help caring for their elderly loved ones. Senior Providers Network offers a cost-effective EAP program that providers high-quality senior care solutions for only $0.50 per employee per month.
Click here to request a demo and see how Senior Providers Network can improve employee productivity with our cost-effective, high-quality senior care solutions today.
