Employe Focus Groups

mrbill

I plan on meeting with groups of employees to listen and hear their views on Health Insurance. Such as - which benefits are important, the co-pays, cost of Rx drugs, Canadian drugs, etc. This will be prior to recommending changes in our Health Plans. My goal is to keep the same premium, which can only be accomplished by increasing the co-pays.
Any advice ? Thanks,

awilliams

Your focus group sounds like a good idea. Please keep us posted on the results.

Anne Williams
Attorney Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers, LLC

ritaanz

I don't know, Mr Bill. You could be opening up Pandora's box. What happens if, after all those meetings, you make the necessary changes to maintain your costs, and NONE of the changes were agreeable to your people?

In my opinion, if you are going to take the time to hold meetings and ask for their input, you have to be open to their answers. I would not expect the results to be cost-cutting.

System

This was the first year of my six with this employer that I conducted group meetings with input from employees. It's the best benefit year we've ever had. It may depend on how you present the plan. I asked ee's what they would change, how much more they would be willing to pay in co-pays to keep the premiums down or how much more they would pay in premiums to keep the co-pays down, etc. They wanted beefed-up benefits with no increase in premiums or co-pays. (go figure). We all got a laugh but we worked on it in several meetings. I took the quotes back to the ee's in a second series of meetings. It really didn't take that long, and it worked. Haven't had a complaint all year. I think the ee input is what did it.

Rockie

I formed an "Insurance Task Force" made up of employees at the beginning of the year. We did this because last year was so horrible insofar as an increase and our insurance carrier did not get us the final rates until WAY late in game.

This task force was basically to educate employees on how insurance increases worked - how what they did impacted healthcare costs. Many of them simply did not understand the basic mechanics of health insurance and why rates went up.

We also had several vendors come in and give a "pitch" on what they had to offer in the way of benefits to go with them. Most of them was in connection with voluntary type benefits.