Health Insurance Report
Jeff Rubleski
| 2 min read
What Michigan employers plan to do about costs and employee benefits
With health costs continuing to rise and key Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions set to go into effect in 2014, every employer faces the same vexing question:
What should we do about our health insurance?
How your company answers this question will be influenced by your views and knowledge about employee benefits, health reform and health plan options. To better understand these viewpoints, we commissioned a survey of benefit decision makers from Michigan companies that offer health insurance to 25 or more employees.
Here are the top-line results of this research report. We hope this gives you some insights into how other employers are preparing for the coming changes in healthcare and perhaps stimulates ideas in developing your health insurance strategies.
Key findings
Employee benefits: Highly valued and changing
- Roughly 80% of employers believe that health benefit packages are important to employee morale, recruitment and retention.
- Yet because of cost concerns:
― 44% have increased employees’ share of premiums
― 43% offer a high deductible health plan
― 42% provide incentives to employees to stay healthy
― 20% have consider dropping employee benefits
- 42% say they are definitely planning or highly likely to make a major change in employee benefits in 2014.
Health reform: Incomplete understanding and negative expectations
- Only 24% of employers think they completely understand how health reform will impact their benefits programs.
- Yet 57% of respondents have personally spent less than 20 hours researching this subject.
- 40% believe that reform will have a negative impact on their businesses, compared to 16% who expect a positive impact.
Health plans: Growing interest in a defined contribution model
- More than one in three companies with 300+ employees have defined contribution plans, which sets aside a fixed-dollar amount for each employee.
- 42% of all employers who don’t have these plans consider them an appealing way to finance benefits.
- 34% of companies have considered switching to a defined contribution model.
GlidePath
Rising benefit costs is a challenge for all companies. GlidePath, a new solution from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Blue Care Network, offers your mid-size company an innovative way to manage spending and risk. It can transform the way you finance your company’s health insurance coverage. With GlidePath’s defined-contribution solution, you can determine your company’s health benefit budget and simplify the administrative work that goes along with offering health benefits.
