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It is no secret that healthcare costs are steadily increasing creating a significant burden for employers offering healthcare benefit plans. By analyzing claims data, we can uncover the trends that are driving these costs. Once we understand the data behind the costs, we can identify opportunities to respond and gain control.
When making decisions about your employer-sponsored healthcare benefits strategy, it is critical to compare your benefit plans to those offered by other employers of a similar size. Benefits benchmarking allows you to remain competitive from a talent acquisition perspective and can uncover opportunities for improvement in the midst of the chaotic healthcare landscape.
Each year, Scott Benefit Services, alongside a leading actuarial consulting firm, conducts a Mid-Market Benefits Benchmarking Survey to help guide employers as they make decisions about their employee benefit plans for the following year.
Results from the 2017 survey reveal several healthcare benefits trends including:
The once-popular television crime documentary 48 Hours got its name from a law-enforcement principle that the most critical time in solving a homicide case is the first 48 hours. In short, a case can go “cold” quickly, placing a premium on a swift, thorough and well-orchestrated response by investigators. A similar dynamic is present in worker’s compensation, although the critical window is often quite a bit shorter. The consequence of a delayed or incomplete response to a workplace injury or incident is routinely a sharp escalation in costs.
When it comes to explaining the need for various types of coverage to a client, we are often stuck using hypothetical scenarios. Recent developments in North Carolina’s Outer Banks provide a real-time example of a sometimes confusing coverage, business income.
On July 27, PCL Construction drove a steel casing through an underground cable that supplies power to parts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. As a result, vacationers left and residents were without power for about a week. This loss of power could not have come at a worse time for the businesses in this area. Based on last year’s tourism numbers, Hatteras Island businesses could have easily lost $2 million for each day of the outage, according to Dare County officials. Some businesses may be able to withstand the loss of revenues for this time, while other businesses face the real possibility of closing the doors for good unless they have insurance coverage for the lost revenue.
Around 1:30 a.m. on Friday morning, in a surprising vote, Senator John McCain walked to the dais of the Senate and uttered one word, “No.” There were gasps on the Senate floor as Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) had already voted against the skinny repeal bill that had appeared to be gaining traction with GOP Senators. The plan was not to pass that particular bill as law, but to find the lowest common denominator that could be agreed upon and continue to work with the House GOP in conference to find something that could replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA).