Smiles per hour. That’s the cost of riding bikes. If you’ve ridden a bike, you’ve probably had the experience of traveling farther on two wheels compared to how far you would go on two feet. When you pedal forward you are multiplying the distance your feet can travel. For example, taking a step only gets you as far as your foot can reach, but a bicycle can coast along a flat surface with relatively little resistance to motion. Pretty cool and highly efficient.
Topics: Benefits, Employee Benefits, Self Funded Insurance, Employee Engagement
Chocolate soufflé. Even the most experienced chefs have a hard time making the perfect soufflé. It’s a dish famously known for its level of technicality as well as food expertise, so jumping in the kitchen to whip this up is no cakewalk. If you thought you were reading an insurance blog but turned into a foodie’s daydream of dark chocolate, bear with me, I promise there’s a point. Health insurance is a lot like baking a cake. The right recipe and ingredients make all the difference. So, if traditional insurance was a plain chocolate cake, self-funded plans are a chocolate soufflé. A little more technical but a lot more rewarding.
Topics: Benefits, Employee Benefits, Self Funded Insurance, Employee Engagement
Plan sponsors face the same challenge every year at renewal. They want to provide competitive benefits for their employees, but rising healthcare costs make it extremely difficult to do so. They continually face the dreaded task of raising deductibles, cutting benefits, and increasing employee contributions just to keep their heads above water.
It's common for a client to ask their health insurance broker, “How can we get our employees more engaged?”. Savvy employers intrinsically know that engagement is a key component to how their employees utilize their benefits. They add incredible health program enhancements (point solutions) to their plan, get excited about the offering, talk about it during Open Enrollment meetings, and even send out marketing materials to remind their employees to utilize the available solutions. Then they wonder, “Why is nobody engaging?!”
Topics: Benefits, Employee Benefits, Care Coordination, Self Funded Insurance, Employee Engagement
Englewood, Colo., April 21, 2020
Topics: Employee Benefits, Care Coordination, Self Funded Insurance, Validation Institute, Health Value Awards
I was recently reading an article lamenting the increasingly isolated modern lives we lead. The author told the story by illustrating the changing ways in which we have come to consume entertainment. For eons, people would go to a musical performance, an opera, or a play and watch live performers, all in a room together. Then, you had the act of going to a movie in a theater or to a drive-in, the eyes of a community focused on one enormous silver screen. With the advent and meteoric rise of television, it was the more intimate ritual of gathering around the boob-tube as a family to take in Dallas, M*A*S*H*, Seinfeld, or The Bachelor. Now, in 2020, each person sits in different rooms of their home, each with their own portable device streaming YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu. With every generation of technology, we have become more personalized, but also more isolated… less connected with the humans in our immediate proximity.
Topics: Care Coordination
Have you ever given much thought to how loud the sun might be? Or, how loud it actually is? I love reading about our cosmos. Black holes, exoplanets, gravitational waves, particle colliders… it all makes my mind race and expand (kind of like the universe [even if we can’t agree on how fast it’s happening!]). But most of all, I like to think about our small place in it all, tucked away on this blue marble in the midst of nothing and everything, all at once.
Topics: Benefits, Employee Benefits, Care Coordination, Self Funded Insurance
Employees paid an average $5,714 out of pocket in premiums alone. This outrageous cost for insurance, is hurting both employees and employer groups.
Unfortunately, for most organizations, these costs are projected to grow exponentially, with no end in sight.
Why are healthcare costs rising so quickly? Factors such as being overcharged by providers, hidden fees, exploitive processes, and many more, prey on the checkbooks of uninformed individuals and have driven up the bottom line of employer benefit packages.
It’s no secret that the health insurance model is broken. Once well-intentioned, health insurance service has degraded into a fragmented, confusing labyrinth of bureaucracy. Recent surveys suggest that only 4% of Americans understand health insurance jargon which results in wasteful spending and frustrated members.
These frustrations have most employer groups shouting, “Enough is enough!” Mid-market employers (defined as organizations with under 2,000 employees) are tired of being forced to offer mediocre benefits at an outlandish cost.
Luckily, there is an alternative: a high performance, self-funded benefit program that focuses on employee engagement and navigation.
Platinum Patients are outliers that make up a mere 5 percent of the population, but spend the same amount on healthcare as the remaining 95 percent combined. This means, if there was a cake offered to 100 people, 5 people would eat as much cake as 95 people.
Okay, so Platinum Patients must be the sickest 5 percent of the population and require a significant amount of care, right? Well, not necessarily.
Topics: Care Coordination, Self Funded Insurance
Empowering employers to get the most out of their healthcare benefit plans.
Apta Health regularly publishes content related to the healthcare benefits. We invite you to follow our blog to stay informed of the latest trends and issues impacting employee healthcare programs.
