How can employers help employees understand their choices?
You can send out benefit summaries, or a link to the carrier’s website with benefit descriptions.
Also, you need to get members engaged. If you are bringing carriers in to do presentations, also do wellness activities or a health fair. Offer blood pressure testing or biometric screening as part of the activity to encourage participation from your work force. You can also invite spouses to participate. Females in the families tend to make the decision on health care, so you need to find a way to get that information to the real decision-maker in the family. You can do that by having them on-site, reaching them through mailings, or referring people back to the company’s own website.
How can an open enrollment period affect an employee’s coverage and cost?
The first way would be if the employer offers more than one plan design. Most carriers will allow the employer to select a couple plans, depending on group size, so at open enrollment, employees have the option of changing their benefit design.
The other thing employees can do during open enrollment is make membership coverage changes that they didn’t make throughout the year and should have. There are certain qualifying events that happen — such as marriage, birth, adoption, divorce or separation, or death of spouse or dependent — where you have a certain time frame to add or remove people from the plan. If the member missed the time frame for the event, open enrollment is the time when members can make sure their contract is accurate and up-to-date.
If employees have more than one choice, the biggest change they can make is to plan design. In that instance, individuals will use their own purchasing criteria, looking at benefit designs and what best fits their needs, then match that to the cost associated with it, whether it’s an employee premium, deductible or coinsurance levels.
How can an employer decide how many choices to provide?
Carrying more than one plan is more administrative work for employers because they have more things to manage, but most carriers will have a size threshold. Small companies get one plan; larger companies may get two or three.
Employers should look at the needs of their work force and determine how they can best satisfy those needs. It goes back to their long-term health care strategy. One size doesn’t fit all.
Don Whitford is vice president of Sales and Client Services for Priority Health. Reach him at [email protected] or (248) 324-4711.
