News You Can Use!

For many producers, it was a rough renewal season. Employers and employees are truly frustrated with rate increases and are beating on their advisors to come up with solutions. Not spreadsheets or explanations. They want solutions. Solutions to the underlying causes of those rate increases. Solutions they can readily understand and adopt. Solutions that put them back in control and will produce lasting results.
Over the coming year, we’re going to publish a series of newsletters that explain, in layman’s terms, how employers can get control of their benefits expenses. And how you can help them do it. The goal is to give you a way to harvest business from your competitors, and shore up your own book of business.
While provider pricing and large claims management are beyond the realm of employer control in the small and mid-group market, it doesn’t really matter. Healthcare financing structure, loss prevention and consumer behavior are by far the most important drivers of benefits costs. For those ‘in the know’, they are tools to be used to win new business and retain clients. Over the coming year, these are the tools we will add to your toolbox:

• Consumer Behavior 101. How to align incentives up and down the value chain so that everyone: insurers, employers and employees alike, are all contributing to benefits cost control. In other words, how to get everyone rowing in the same direction at the same time, toward the same destination.

• Population Loss Prevention. Most entities engage in risk management and loss prevention to protect physical assets such as cash, inventory, equipment and so forth. Yet few apply loss prevention principles to their most expensive asset: their people. We will show you how population loss prevention can cut claims costs and premiums, and attract a better workforce.

• Principles of Healthcare Finance, also known as, “Don’t Spend Money You Don’t Have To.” The problem in the small to mid-group market is that even if an employer and employees do everything right, the savings are gobbled up by the carrier. It doesn’t have to be that way. The trick is to choose a funding mechanism that either doesn’t spend the money in the first place, or returns the money to the employer. Or, best case, does both.  

Imagine being able to walk into any group and say, “these are the things that cause your premiums to go up, here is how we can fix it, and this is what you can expect in results when we do it.”   Understandable. Transparent. Smart.
At AHR, we’re on your side, ready to help. Always. Stay tuned for more!