Health Care Costs

woodallmd

What is your company doing to help manage rising health care costs?

What is the cost sharing split between employer and employee contributions? (Ours will be 75% / 25% for 2003.)

Are you doing anything different with plan designs? (We are also raising co-pays etc.)

Are you using electronic technology (paperless environment) to cut costs?

Pattylu

We are doing a 70/30 split. We have been doing this for a number of years. What we changed this year was adding a hospital stay co-pay. If an employee or dependent has to stay in the hospital they will be charged $250 by that institution but our company will reimburse them for the full $250. By adding this co-pay to our plan we were able to significantly reduce our rates. We were going to have an increase of 15% but we were able to reduce it to 11%. We did make another small change and that was to increase the copay to the doctors' office. We are not making a changes to go electronic. Good luck with your decisions.

Lori B

We typically pay 80/20 for ee coverage of HMO, and 75/25 for ee coverage of PPO. The ratio drops to about 70/30 for family coverage.

We faced a large increase last year and polled our ees about their options:

1. Flat rate increase for them
2. Start playing with co-pays and co-insurance amts to offset the increase somewhat.

Our ees overwhelmingly voted for option 2. Their rationale: make those who use the plans the most pick up more of the tab. Thus, we increased co-pays for office visits and Rx. We also increased deductibles in the PPO if you go out of network. We also shifted co-insurance from 90/70 to 80/60, but left our out of pocket max alone. My concern is that our rates will only keep increasing. There is only so much adjusting you can do with copays, etc. We will be looking for more creative solutions soon...

Side note: your increase doesn't sound bad at all. We were quoted a 31% increase but negotiated it down to about 16%.

franfields

Our big hit was last year and we had to go from a $10/$15/$25 co-pay on prescriptions to $7/$25/$50. We stayed with 90%/10% in-network and 70%/30% out of network. With negotiation, that got us down to a 24% increase in premium.

This year, with negotiation, we got a 14% increase and decided to keep the same coverage, suck it up, and not pass it along to the ee's.