Employers can control and even reduce health-related costs
In today’s world of double-digit cost increases for health care, it’s hard to imagine being able to control or even reduce employer costs.
But ask yourself these questions: Is your company unwilling to accept 10, 20 or 30-plus percent yearly increases in health-related costs? Do you believe in proactively setting strategies and engaging employees in win-win solutions? Are you confident in your ability to overcome challenges? Do you want to distinguish your firm as best-in-class? Do you believe that there must be a better way to increase worker productivity and manage health care costs?
Lots of “Yes” answers? Then your company can gain the upper-hand over health-related costs!
“Set a strategy, realize it won’t happen overnight and don’t blindly accept the fact that health care costs are going to rise; you wouldn’t do that in any other area of your business would you?” says Todd Miller, Vice President of Oswald Companies.
For example, Miller says, one approach is to understand the role health-risk factors play in health care utilization, productivity, and absenteeism. From there, employers can begin to develop a strategy that will maximize their investment in employee health and control excess employment costs.
The University of Michigan Health Management Research Center has found that employees who improved their health-risk status experience measurable improvements in work productivity and lower health-care costs. “When you control health-risk factors, you control costs,” Miller explains.
According to the Integrated Benefits Institute, more than 85% of employers, over the next five years, want to link health and medical data to employee absence, lost productivity, and financial performance. By beginning with the right organizational change strategy, employers can make this happen. “Employee health, in a broad sense, should be viewed as a competitive advantage, not a cost burden,” says Miller.
Miller poses the following question to businesses everywhere: “Why don’t companies apply the same rigor and have the same success in controlling health-related costs as they do with safety programs, quality management, or other enterprise-level change initiatives?”
Miller’s answer: “Because they don’t have an integrated health-management model that provides a blueprint for change, metrics for monitoring progress, targeted tactics for achieving results, and a data-driven method for evaluating success and return-on-investment. Employers must make this a business imperative with a serious strategy behind it.”
The approach cannot by reactive―simply shifting costs to employees or reducing insurance benefits. Instead, employers must understand how they can use overall employee health and vitality as a serious business strategy” says Miller. Companies that take this to heart will leave their competitors and escalating health costs behind them.
“Employers can ill afford to view health-related expenses as simply the cost of doing business. To do so in today’s economy is a critical mistake. The most important thing to keep asking yourself is, What can we change in our culture?” Miller says.
Oswald Companies is a award-winning consultative insurance brokerage and risk management firm and the insurance partner for the Ohio Society of CPAs. Look for new member and corporate industry member insurance programs in 2008!
Oswald became the official administrator for the Society’s member insurance programs April 1, 2007. If you have specific questions regarding this change in our insurance programs, please call CPAnswers, the Society’s member service center, at 888.959.1212 or Oswald’s Ohio Society of CPAs insurance hotline at 888.767.4548.
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LAST UPDATED 1/14/2008