Benefit Premiums
diane
16 Posts
Here's our situation. We're a small employer (40 ee's) in suburban Philadelphia. Most of our employees reside at the home office, but we do have about 6 sales reps located in other states. We need a health care plan that covers all employees. Last year we switched from Aetna to Blue Cross because Aetna hiked our rates 33%!! I just got the renewal rates from Blue Cross. You guessed it...rate renewal 22.5% higher this year. This is getting ridiculous. I'm surprised because everything I've been reading indicated increases in the range of 12-15%. Are you all experiencing the same kind of increases? It is true that our drug plan is bundled with the medical plan, and I know drug plans are out of control. Our drug plan isn't that rich, however. It's a 3 tiered plan with a $10/$20/$35 co-pay. I'd like to give senior managment some insight about other small employers' experiences. Thanks!
Comments
Being a medical facility, we are constantly being asked to take more in reimbursement from these insurance companies, but they continue to hike up the premiums more and more. Most of these same companies had record profits last year.
I have been calling around this morning to some of my peers and they are all in the same boat. Some smaller practices have opted to give employees what money they were paying for benefits and have them get their own insurance - it's gotten that bad.
Recruiting wise, we couldn't afford not to have an insurance plan, but it is getting harder and harder to ask employees to take less money in raises and then drop a bomb like this on them also. We have previously paid almost 100% of the employee premium, but we won't be able to afford this much longer. We have also gone up on deductibles/co-pays, etc. in an effort to lower premiums. After a while, insurance will only cover catastrophic illnesses and will be meaningless otherwise.
I don't know of solutions to this, but I am afraid there is going to be a huge mutiny about health insurance costs in this nation in the not too distant future.
and from my experience - there wasn't much difference in the type of services provided, and the intermediate care is MUCH faster than emergency room care .Another thing, a lot of HMOs give 30-days supply of prescription for a set co-pay fee,say $ 10. I found out that I could get - by really being pushy about it - a 90 day supply for that very same $ 10.
While the company can try to save - the employees also have to be proactive.
We just couldn't pass those all on to employees, especially those electing family plans. The increase would have surpassed any salary increase they might get. Making plan design changes didn't seem to buy us much... an increase to $10 office visit (yes we are still at $5, probably not for long) , increasing prescription drug to $10/$15/$30 and increasing day surgery copay to $100 would have for many outweighed the savings in premiums.
We have found some room to absorb all but 15% of the increase, which we are passing on to employees. But next year we are probably going to have to re-think our formula... We can't keep absorbing, and there is no sign of a slowdown in health plan costs.
Finally, As my Doctor says - "Steps to Good Health" 1. Don't smoke, 2, don't smoke, 3. Just in case you missed the point - don't smoke. 4. Always wear your seatbelt.
I know this is an old post, but I just had to share. We were very excited at this year's re-newal as we had only a 10.14% increase. But if you want to speak of staggering..in 1988 we were hit with a 28.9% increase, and in 1989, a 54.8% increase!!! We lessened our benefits and '93, '94 and '95 were good years. We were hit again in '96 with a 17.8% increase. We experienced increases through the next several years - 13.55%, 16.39%, 14.16. So you can see why we were excited about this year's rates. We have over 100 employees now but this is fairly recent; we always had about 75.
Thanks,
A~