Healing Healthcare for Employers
“Healthcare is already fixed, it’s just not evenly distributed,” Dave Chase laments in his writings about employer’s struggles with healthcare costs. It’s a play on what the Sci-Fi writer Gibson said over 20 years ago: “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
The future of healthcare is NOW!
There are many companies and municipalities who are living in the future and have solved the healthcare mystery for their employees already. We can learn a lot from their winning. No since reinventing the wheel.
In his new book “The CEO’s Guide To Restoring The American Dream” Dave Chase shares in simple terms how to crack the rising costs of healthcare while providing multiple real world examples. He explains the rising costs of healthcare are disconnected from real prices and show no signs of rising. Why do healthcare costs keep going up as technology improves? Aren’t computers and technology supposed to make things faster and simpler and cheaper? Not in healthcare. We see prices of TVs and computers drop every year but this never transcends to healthcare. Why?
Simply put, hospitals and insurance companies only “profit” when costs go up. They need prices to go up and they need to keep those cost/prices hidden to do it. It’s a shell game, not a trick: hospitals inflate prices and then insurance companies pay their contracted rate (much less than charged). Then, insurance companies show employers how much they saved them while hospitals claim the part they “wrote off” as charity or lost money. All the while, neither really cares about quality or transparency—when a mistake or error is made the hospital is usually still paid.
On top of all this disconnect between costs and quality, insurance brokers make huge profits and bonuses simply by renewing employer healthcare plans every year.
When is the last time your insurance broker brought a renewal that had lower premiums or even unchanged premiums?
Never.
Is your broker offering you the best deal? Do they disclose how much and how they get paid?
Some simple ways to begin to turn the healthcare ship around for your company:
-Your health insurance plan should be managed by a CEO level team
-Get a Benefits Advisor that works for you and is transparent
-Focus on Primary Care to improve value and lower costs
-Self insure or partial self insure
-Work with Value based and transparent Third Party Administrators
-Look for Centers of Excellent to send employees
-Use Evidence based and value driven pharmacy plans
I highly recommend CEOs and business owners read ‘The CEO’s Guide To Restoring The American Dream” and learn proven ways to lower costs, while improving benefits and health of your employees. The companies highlighted in this book have increased employee benefits while lowering overall healthcare cost by 20% or more.
Seem impossible? The fix is in already.