Considering that 7% of adults are diabetic and an additional 26% are pre-diabetic, is your company doing anything to help at-risk employees improve their health?

This group health captive program allows mid-sized employers to offer a partially self-funded health plan and enjoy the significant underwriting profit an insurance company earns.

Proven tools, techniques, and incentives are put into place to help employees better manage their health.

Current Healthcare State:

* For many employers, the cost of health insurance continues to rise and is now the second largest expense item, trailing only payroll. The average annual cost per family is almost $13,000 per year.
* This puts medium sized employers in a difficult position as they have very few product options and scarce information about the healthcare system. They often don't even know what claims they have or where their premium dollars go.
* The lack of transparency inherent in the system prevents employers from taking control of the cost of health insurance. The only thing clear to them are the annual increases they experience each year.

How The Becker Benefit Group Can Help:

* Our Group Health Captive allows these medium sized employers to address these annual increases and access the alternative insurance techniques currently used by larger 1000+ employer companies.
* Providing complete control over health insurance costs by offering transparency and the opportunity to reduce these costs, the Group Health Captive actually creates stability and helps to increase profits.
* Our Group Health Captive encourages a healthier workplace and provides employees with a better quality of life, both at work and at home.

How The Group Health Captive Works:

* A group of employers form a Group Health Captive in an effort to reduce the cost of health insurance. It can be formed with a variety of employer groups such as:

1. Existing Group Captives or Risk Retention Groups
2. Existing Self-Insured Groups for Workers Compensation
3. Clients of an Agency or Broker
4. Trade Associations
5. Franchisees
6. Portfolio Companies of Private Equity Firms

Key Features:

* Provides access to the same tools, techniques, and risk reduction strategies offered by the largest of employers
* Eliminates carrier profit
* Minimizes state premium taxes
* Offers ability to eliminate or modify state mandated benefits
* Offers complete plan flexibility and transparency
* Encourages working together with “like-minded” employers
* All wellness, coaching, and EAP plan included
* All monies not spent on claims are returned or retained by employer

We anticipate an employer's savings of 13% in year one and 22% by year five.

I am convinced that if your company has the financial wherewithal, this approach can make a lot more sense than fully insured health plans.

Gary Becker
Becker Benefit Group
11000 Owings Mills Blvd
Ste 6a
Owings Mills, MD 21117
(410) 902-8800
http://www.beckerbenefit.com

Adding new mandates is an ongoing activity. Sure, they’re one-off when they happen, but they keep happening.

If you take a look at that link I posted in the response above, you can see where the “gaps” are in mandates. A quick look and you can predict which ones will end up being filled over the next couple of years.

For example, one of the most costly has been mental health parity – 47 states now have it, and many have adopted it in the last few years.

There are valid reasons for many of these mandates, but we should recognize that every time we add one they add new costs into the system that need to be priced into insurance.

As to your broader question, there are many reasons why health costs continue to grow so quickly. Among them are poor public health, increasing availability of new medicines and treatments that didn’t exist before, overuse, abuses in the system, and many, many others.

So, if you mandate that an insurer cover something new, they are now not only exposed to the cost of that service as it exists at the time of the mandate, but also to the underlying inflation as to that coverage that will make it more expensive over time.

I hope that answers what you were asking, thanks again for posting.