Health Insurance

Frenchie

Our contract is up for renewal on 9/1 so we are shopping. We are a self funded plan with stop loss coverage. We happen to have one individual in the plan that has cancer. The renewal rates have been terrible. We're looking at 30-40% increases and that's only if we do a laser specific for that individual. I've looked at several options; fully funded, MRA's, FSA's etc., but nothing seems to really impact the numbers.

Is there anyone out there doing creative things that have helped the numbers, absent of eliminating the coverage altogether?

Betty I_O

We also are self-funded and offer both a PPO and an HMO to our employees. Our approach was to work with both carriers to change plan design; i.e., raising co-pays (including pharmacy), applying co-pays to things previously without one, limitng fertility services to a specific $ maximum, lowering the cut-off age for full-time students, and revamping and redefining organ transplant procedures. These revisions resulted in significant savings. We also increased the employee cost sharing (we also have a pre-tax program in place). This year, we raised the maximum for the stop loss and managed to get a two-year rate guarantee from our PPO. We found it helpful to not only communicate our conerns to our carriers, but also to meet with them regularly, along with our broker, to "brainstorm."