Every year, when we see the rising price of health insurance, we wonder: Isn’t there a better way? Is there a lower-cost option that provides the same benefit for our team? How can we bring these costs down?
Every year, when employers see how much the cost of health insurance has risen, they ask themselves: Is there a better way? Is there a lower-cost option that still provides the quality benefits my team needs?
Our answer: Yes, at least there should be. Thus, we developed YourWay Frontier—a simple and cost-effective way for employers to offer health benefits to employees. Frontier is one way to lower the costs of your group health insurance. But there are more.
Here are four things you can do to control your health insurance spend:
1) Shop Around
- If you suspect your insurance costs are too high, an easy and logical first step is to look at what other carriers have to offer. This could be as simple as telling your broker you want to see prices from other providers in your market.
- If you’re on a community-rated plan, many carriers provide their rates online. You can compare your current rates to what is being offered by each individual carrier and even look over that insurance carrier’s coverage availability.
2) Keep Your Team Healthy
- A healthy lifestyle can lead to lower risk profiles related to diabetes, heart disease, and many other health issues. Healthier populations tend to utilize their insurance less. The less money insurance carriers pay out in claims, the lower they can keep prices.
- Organizations are contributing more and more to improve the overall health and wellness of their teams. Implementing wellness initiatives are great for promoting healthy work cultures and have the ancillary benefit of driving insurance costs down via fewer trips to the doctor, urgent cares, and hospitals.
3) Stay In-Network
- Health insurance networks are generally regional. Meaning that the provider list for a carrier is based around your region. If an employee uses a doctor outside of that designated region, the carrier may determine the visit to be “out-of-network”, making it subject to a higher deductible.
- For example, if your business’s office is in Manhattan, and you have a handful of team members located in Buffalo, NY, the Buffalo employees may be subjected to higher “out-of-network” deductibles even with the same exact group health plan offered to Manhattan-employees. Furthermore, as an employer, you may pay your insurance carrier an additional fee to obtain extra networks to cover those employees.
- Terminating your Buffalo team probably doesn’t sound like the best idea. So, OneBridge Benefits has built a better benefit for you—put your remote employees on the YourWay Frontier ICHRA plan. All you have to do as an employee is put money into your employees’ health benefits account (ICHRA) and they can go to the individual marketplace to buy their own in-network health insurance.
4) Move Off the Group Plan and Onto the Individual Marketplace
- We’ve designed a very simple, easy-to-use tool that highlights the cost of health insurance on the individual market.
- If you pay more for your bronze, silver, or gold plans than what is currently being charged on the individual marketplace, you are overpaying for your team’s health insurance.
- Fortunately, you have great options available to you:
Option A — Provide a Better Benefit
- Continue offering your employees the same amount of money you have been, and let them save the difference for future health expenses.
Option B — Save Money
- Lower your contribution amount to provide the same level of coverage on the individual marketplace.
Either way, your life gets a lot easier. You put money into your employees’ health benefits account (ICHRA) and your employees buy their own insurance on the individual marketplace. OneBridge handles all of the administration and guides your employees along the way.
We’d love to offer a complimentary analysis to determine how the YourWay Frontier ICHRA best fits your organization. Book a time into our calendar to get started.
