The Top 5 Health Insurance Trends You NEED to be Leverage in 2020! [WEBINAR]

All right, guys, let's get going here. Thank you again for jumping on the webinar today. This one, I'm actually going to tell you is probably going to be really short. Sweet. I know it's a very busy time of the year. Typically these webinars are about 30 minutes. Normally I have a subject matter expert on to interview to go over a specific solution to bring you guys. To show you guys today, what I thought I would do is just spend some time on the top five health insurance trends I believe you need to leverage going into 2020 if you're not already now, when I say trends, what I'm saying is, you know, call them predictions, call them what I see as coming down the pike or where I see things heading into the future of health insurance. But I also think these are very important topics you need to be aware of. And there's going to be ideas and strategies included in these five trends that I think you could definitely leverage next year to help your team, help your organization build a better health plan for less money. That's always the ultimate goal is what can we do to continue building better health plans while we continue to bring money back to our employees and to our bottom line? A couple housekeeping items. If you guys have any questions, I'm going to keep this very low key today. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to put them in the Q and A box or just put them in the chat box. My goal is at the end, I will go into the chat box, into the Q and A and answer any questions you guys might have. So let's get started. I'm going to level set by giving a quick background as to maybe why I decided to put this webinar on with this specific topic. It's December 12th, and I hope for most of you, if your health insurance was renewing this time of the year, whether it's December and January, decisions have been made for many of you. You probably have already conducted your education meetings. Things are kind of in place, winding down for some of you, you still may be caught in the craziness of trying to get everything wrapped up for your benefits for 2020. But here's the deal. Whether you've made decisions or not, or you're about to make a decision on where your health insurance plan is headed for 2020. In talking with a lot of employers today, I see a couple common themes going on with health insurance decisions right now, especially with this 2020 renewal, as most employers are renewing here on January 1st. Number one, your decision included some kind of disruption. And so, yes, decisions are made, things are in place, employees are educated. But you're not overly happy with the decision, maybe because it did come with some disruption. What is disruption? Well, could be the fact that rates went up, costs went up. Again, you have to pass some of that cost on to your employees. Again, disruption could be that, you know, you had to change insurance companies. Sometimes that's good, but that also can be bad. And whether it's good or bad, it does come with disruption because employees are now relearning how to use a new network, work with a new insurance company. For some employers, it was a need to change insurance companies because the rate increase your current insurance company wanted was just too large. Or you stayed with the same insurance carrier, but you had to raise your deductibles, you had to raise your out of pocket limits, you had to completely tweak and kind of water down the benefits yet again so you could keep cost in line. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about disruption is decisions are made. But yet again, the decisions came with some disruption to you, to your organization, and to especially to your employees. The second thing I'm seeing right now is where employers are making decisions. The decisions have been made, and it's kind of like the health insurance plan has been filed away for another year. When I ask, what is your plan now that you've made the decisions, what is your plan for 2020? Many employers don't have a plan. It's kind of like, well, we hope next year's renewal isn't as bad as the one we just went through. And there's just no plan of attack. There's no proactive approach to what can be looked at, what strategies can be implemented next year to really start reining in cost and really start bringing control to that 2021 renewal. And then the third thing I'm hearing quite often right now is, okay, so if you don't have a plan in place, what is your strategy? Well, we're just going to wait until next renewal. We'll see how rates look next October. We'll determine what decisions we're going to make at that time. And I'm here to tell you that that's a strategy set up for failure because it's no strategy whatsoever. It's kind of like deciding what you're going to do with the house, calling the fire department, and now the fire. The house is already on fire, the house is broken down, and now you call the fire department in to take care of it. That's the same way when it comes to dealing with your health insurance renewals. If you wait until the rates come out to decide what your strategy is going to be, it's too late. Now. You're in defensive mode, you're in reactive mode, and you're just trying to figure out what you can do to take care of the large increase you're dealing with versus already going into the renewal with a strategy or with a plan of attack, regardless of the kind of renewal you are about to see. So knowing that this could very well be you on this webinar right now, your renewal could have had disruption. You might not have a plan for 2020 or you're just yet. You're just going to kind of wait and see and cross your fingers to hope next year's renewal isn't as bad as this year's is or was. This is what this webinar is for. I want to kind of dive in or take a peek into 2020 and go over five trends I'm seeing right now, five predictions I have about how employers, how you can really leverage some of the things that are out there today to take control of next year's renewal. Start bringing back quality benefits to your health plan and most importantly, help your employees get rid of really high quality access to the healthcare system. Because if you've been on my previous webinars, you've heard me say this multiple times. At the end of the day, whether you fully insure your plan, you self fund it, whatever you do, the decisions your employees make inside the healthcare system ultimately drive the insurance costs you are dealing with. And my ultimate goal with every webinar, my ultimate goal with my clients that I work with is to help them realize that it's not about buying insurance. You don't have an insurance problem. What you have is a risk management problem. And when you start focusing on your claims, medical and pharmacy claims, inside your health insurance plan, and you help your employees navigate the healthcare system effectively, that is really how you can start increasing or bringing back the benefits you used to have years ago for less money than you are paying today. So with that being said, why don't we just get right to it and start diving into these five trends that I expect our industry to see next year. Number one.

HSAs are losing popularity.

Now. What in the heck do I mean when I say that? Let's go back 15 plus years when HSA Health Savings Accounts were introduced to us. The whole purpose of bringing the HSA component into the marketplace for employers, for individuals was predicated on the theory that if we raise deductibles, if we give employees the opportunity to set aside money ahead of time to pay for future medical expenses, consumers, employees, individuals alike are going to become better health care purchasers. They're going to become better consumers.

15 years later. I am here to say that has not happened yet. And the challenge that I see a lot of employers facing today with HSA plans is that most employers have made the decision to go to an HSA plan simply because it's a cost containment measure. By increasing that deductible, by doing away with the co pays on office visits, specialty specialist visits, urgent care medications, you ultimately do impact your premiums, right? You lower your premiums by increasing the deductible and getting rid of the CO pays. And if you guys can remember, if you on this webinar are on an HSA or you remember moving to an HSA many, many years ago, the premium differential between the traditional PPO plan and an HSA was huge. I remember days of bringing and showing HSA plans to my clients 10 years ago and the premium differential in some cases were 25, 30, 35% of what they were paying in a ppo plan. Talking about 30, 35% less. Today, that gap is much, much smaller. Here's why. As employers have navigated or migrated to the HSA plans, couple things have kind of gone wrong with strategy number one. Far too many employers have moved to an HSA or high deductible health plan, but are not funding the health savings account itself. And they're relying on the employees to fund that account by themselves. And the challenge with that is today, when 70, 80 plus percent of the working Americans out there are living paycheck to paycheck, it is very hard for employees to be able to set aside money to put into the HSA accounts. And the consequence of all that is here now we have high deductible health plans that have 25003500 $5000 deductibles without any money being put into a health savings account. So it's really nothing more than a four or $5,000 plan where the employee has to pay the entire four to $5,000 up front before there's any coverage. As a result, consumers are avoiding care. Employees can't cut a check for $4,000, $5,000 if they have to use the health care system if they were hospitalized. Heck, most Americans today can't cut a check for $1,000. And so as these HSA deductibles, these high deductible health plans, the deductibles have continued to increase. Employees are not becoming smarter health care consumers. They're actually just avoiding care altogether. And I think it's very easy to understand what happens when you avoid care. All of a sudden it becomes too late. You wait to take care of a healthcare issue that you should be addressing today and you're not because of the cost. And you wait until much, much later when that healthcare issue is much worse, resulting in even higher cost. So in the end, summarizing bullet point number one, HSAs are definitely losing popularity. You're seeing more and more employers go back to the PPO structure. You're seeing more and more employers bringing back co pays and you're seeing more and more employers start to look for ways to help their employees access high quality, low cost care and rewarding their employees for those decisions by actually making that access free to the employee. And again, if you've been on my previous webinars, you've heard me talk about that and we're going to talk about that here in a little bit. So trend number one, HSAs are losing steam. The PPO plan is starting to make a rise again.

Trend number two, smartphone solutions are a must. If you are not using a smartphone solution tied to your benefits today, you need to start getting on this right away. Now, what do I mean by smartphone solutions? Obviously, we're talking about apps that go on the smartphones of your employees. Now, I'm a big believer that the apps that a specific carrier, a medical carrier, provides directly from their plans isn't enough. An app provided by, say, a Blue Cross Blue Shield, a Cigna, a UnitedHealthcare. They're good apps, but they're really directed to help people. Just use what's available through United Healthcare or whoever that specific carrier is. You really need to start looking at third party smartphone solutions. Now. Here's why. If you're on this webinar right now, I'm confident in saying that you have three, at least three, if not four, working four generations in the workplace, right? We've got baby boomers, we've got Gen X, we've got Millennials, which is gentle, why? And then we got the new generation coming out of college, the Gen Z. The one thing that connects all four of those generations is the smartphone. Today, everybody is using them. Now, I often am told by employers saying, you know, not all my employees have access to smartphones. And that is true. I understand that and I empathize with that. But I think when you think about designing your benefits and designing your health plan, you have to understand when you say that what you're really talking about is probably less than 5% of your population does not have access to a smartphone. So when you're putting strategies into your health plan and you're going to incorporate smartphone solutions, you have to realize at the end of the day, it is going to impact and help the 90, 95 plus percent of your workforce. Now, what are some of the smartphone solutions that are out there today that I like, that I think are doing a great job? Number one, Benazon B is for a quick spelling of Benazon, it's B as in boy, E N as in Nancy, E Z as in zebra, O N as in Nancy. We provide the Benezon app as part of our solutions to our clients. Here's what the Benezon app allows you to do. Number one, all of your employees can access all of their benefits, whether it's medical, dental, vision, life, long term disability from the app. From the phone. It gives them the opportunity to take photographs of their ID cards so they never really have to carry their ID cards with them anywhere. Number three, it gives them access to simple solutions like Goodrx, which is a prescription drug solution, which allows them to get discounts on their medications at specific pharmacies in their geographic area. And it also gives them access to concierge services, which I think is the biggest component, which is when your employees need help understanding their benefits, especially their health plan, often they end up in your office asking you a bunch of questions and needing immediate help. What the concierge piece allows or provides on the app, especially on the Benezon app, is it gives them that 247 access to help understanding their benefits. Whether it's a question on what is their deductible, whether it's helping them find a doctor or you have an employee that has a medical bill and they're freaking out because they don't understand what they owe or what the medical bill is saying. That concierge component helps answer all of those questions for your employees. And more importantly, what I love about the Benezon app is their team, their concierge team speaks over a hundred different languages and dialects. So if you have a bilingual or, you know, bilingual workforce, it's a very, very advantageous solution to have because it can help all employees no matter what language they're speaking. So again, Benazon is a great app. Another great smartphone solution out there today is healthjoy, which also provides the same concierge same benefit structure as Benazon does. Strive S as in Sam T as in Tom Rive is another great one. But point here, guys, is heading into 2020, I highly, highly urge you to start pursuing smartphone solutions if you're not, because it's going to lead into another trend that you're about to see. And here's the one last very cool thing about smartphone solutions. You could implement them at any time throughout the year. This is.