Changes in Employee Health Insurance Benefits

If you are an employer in the Quad Cities that pays for a portion of your employees’ health insurance premiums, you should learn about the major changes that are now happening. No longer will you be limited to the ho-hum plans that about four different carriers offer — where they tell you what you can have and that your premium is going up and your benefits are reduced.

Now, you get to design your company’s plan and it will have the benefits that you want; plus, now you can truly save money on your health insurance premiums, which could amount to about $1,000 per employee per year. If you have 10 employees, statistics tell us that you should save about $10,000 a year.

How can this be? Simple. Currently, you are stuck with plans that provide benefits that cost a lot of money that your employees do not use. Now, there is a way for you to provide those benefits, but you only pay for them if and when employees use them. This may sound too good to be true, but that is what every employer says until they see the process illustrated.

This process is utilized by almost every large employer and was discovered by some very smart smaller employers, too. This process utilizes statistics, section 105 of the IRS code and an MERP (Medical Expense Reimbursement Program). You can look up the code and MERP, but the statistics come from the United States Department of Labor: more than half of all employees barely use their health plan or do not use it at all; yet, you and your employees are paying for it every month. That is a concern and an expense you can now control.

Employers and employees also are:

• Concerned about the ever-escalating deductibles;
•  Worried about rising health care costs every year;
• Worried that your child’s and/or your doctor are not in the plan;
• Concerned about the increasing government’s mandates that increase costs;
• Worried about the ever increasing out-of-pocket costs;
• Concerned about the mandated networks and limiting coverages.

This process has been around for years, but it has had some major improvements lately. One of those is using different ways of looking at your claims history before the process devises, develops and even offers you the opportunity to participate in a specialized program exclusively for you and your employees. Your current insurance in most cases will not provide you with your claims history. This process helps employers obtain this critical information from most insurance carriers in America. When combining the statistics of your claims with Sect 105/MERP, the process can develop a long-term sustainable health insurance program for you and your employees.

All of this sounds like it may be for employer groups of thousands of employees —  and it is. But the process was developed by very smart people, and they reduced it to perform as well for small groups — as few as five employees. The optimum size group of the hundreds of plans in force in the USA is less than 100 full-time employees.

Lehrman Group has been in the health insurance industry in Arizona since 1988, and to us, this is the most exciting revelation for employers in years. Now you can have a plan that you control and design. It would be the first plan that you can change to your liking whenever you wish. QCBN

By Ken Whitley

If you would like more information, contact Ken Whitley at ken@lehrmangroup.com or 928-813-7173 x 19.

Ken Whitley is the director of group sales at Lehrman Group.