September 8, 2021
In offering group health plans to employees, businesses have a lot to navigate and understand about the options presented by their benefits advisor team. The smaller the employer, the fewer the options available to them, while the largest employers with thousands of employees have every vendor clamoring for their business. But the majority of businesses …
September 1, 2021
Today’s competitive landscape and rapidly changing technologies are disrupting previous practices and forcing businesses to re-evaluate how and what they pay for the services they buy and the relationships they enter. Insurance and human resource services are no different. What is an Employee Benefits Advisor Before we go into more discussion, let’s first define an …
August 24, 2021
The Commonwealth Fund released their periodic comparison report of various national health systems this month entitled “Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly.” The report is a series of comparisons performed every 4 years, with prior entries in the series below: 2017: International Comparison Reflects Flaws and Opportunities for Better U.S. Health Care 2014: How the U.S. …
August 19, 2021
We’ve been closely watching reports on how Americans have been consuming healthcare as the COVID pandemic has evolved. In 2020, we saw drastic decreases in services, leading to worry about the impact of skipped screenings and doctor’s visits such as preventative services. Previous conversations with our friend Josh Axene (July 2020, January 2021) centered on …
August 11, 2021
Healthcare costs are a top expense for most businesses, so companies can find great value in cost reduction strategies. And if we can marry lower costs for a business with as good, if not better, benefits and outcomes? That’s the goal. One such strategy that has typically been reserved for only the largest employers is Direct …
August 4, 2021
Grant Thornton, a large accounting company, conducts a survey of CFOs every quarter and their second-quarter survey of 2021 yielded some insights on how finance leaders are thinking about talent shortages and rising employee benefit costs. CFOs and People Leaders See Rising Health Plan Costs as a Challenge The key takeaway is that human capital …
July 28, 2021
We’re starting to see rate increase requests in various states, with some good data coming out of Connecticut recently. These initially proposed rates are for the individual and small group markets, which are filed with the state as part of the ACA. Overall, the rates filed for 2022 are higher than last year. Let’s dive …
July 21, 2021
America’s healthcare system gets wide discussion. Study after study finds that it’s expensive and underperforms comparable systems. When we say that American healthcare is expensive and growing increasingly so year after year, we need to understand why. Why Does Health Insurance Get More Expensive? We assume health insurance will be more expensive every year. Financial …
July 13, 2021
As benefits and healthcare consultants, we salivate over statistics and data about health care costs. We collect and pull apart figures around spending and claims but our clients don’t always want to know all the details. As they say, I don’t want to know how the sausage gets made! Our clients just want us to …
July 7, 2021
While it’s easy to say healthcare needs solutions, we start any consulting conversation with a clear outline of where things are at today, and where we are trying to go in the future. Some key facts about American healthcare: Deductibles are higher than the emergency savings of many Americans Wages have been fairly stagnant over …
