Advocacy: Creative Solution To Health Coverage Woes
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Over the last few years, employers have pulled out all the stops to mitigate the impact of rising health care costs on employees.
Certain approaches used by employers, like tiered prescription programs, have yielded mixed results. Other approaches, like dramatically increasing co-pays or gutting coverable benefits, have alienated large groups of employees and spurred others to leave their companies for perceived greener pastures.
Maybe it’s optimism on their part, but a number of experienced benefits professionals still ask us hopefully about the perfect plan, benefits technology tool or consumer-directed strategy that will solve their problems in year one, no less.
Sadly, there is no benefits technology or consumer-directed strategy that alone makes possible the perfect plan. Too many diverse elements are at play we all know this.
There is a powerful and underestimated way of creating more plan value for employers and employees, however, and that is through advocacy. This is not legislative advocacy, but literally the commitment to make advocacy and advocates readily available to employees.
Why is advocacy destined to be the difference-maker?
Because even though most people already have familiar resources in their day-to-day lives such as accountants, lawyers and counselors when it comes to their health care, they have no comparable resources.
Advocacy offers one of the best approaches to helping people navigate the perils of the system while at the same time providing another way to control costs.
Some of our firm’s largest accounts passed through the managed care-health maintenance organization era retaining their indemnity plan. They have managed to maintain these plans while not restricting availability or utilization of care averaging medical care inflation at levels well below 50 percent of the national average.
They have accomplished this by providing their employees with a combination of education, assistance and advocacy a true hands-on approach to health care.
o Education comes in the form of written and online resources on subjects like drug interactions, illnesses and disease both acute and chronic.
o Assistance is provided in the form of benefit plans: EAP, wellness and disease management. Also key is active human resources assistance in helping employees resolve issues.