Since the ACA was enacted eight years ago, many employers are re-examining employee benefits in an effort to manage costs, navigate changing regulations, and expand their plan options. Self-funded plans are one way that’s happening.
In 2017, the UBA Health Plan survey revealed that self-funded plans have increased by 12.8% in the past year overall, and just less than two-thirds of all large employers’ plans are self-funded.
Here are six of the reasons why employers are opting for self-funded plans:
1. Lower operating costs frequently save employers money over time.
2. Employers paying their own claims are more likely to incentivize employee health maintenance, and these practices have clear, immediate benefits for everyone. 3. Increased control over plan dynamics often results in better individual fits, and more needs met effectively overall. 4. More flexibility means designing a plan that can ideally empower employees around their own health issues and priorities. 5. Customization allows employers to incorporate wellness programs in the workplace, which often means increased overall health.
6. Risks that might otherwise make self-funded plans less attractive can be managed through quality stop loss contracts.
If you want to know more about why self-funding can keep employers nimble, how risk can be minimized, and how to incorporate wellness programs, contact us for a copy of the full white paper, “Self-Funded Plans: A Solid Option for Small Businesses.”
Recently, the President signed a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act’s Individual Mandate (the tax penalty imposed on individuals who are not enrolled in health insurance). While some are praising this action, there are others who are concerned with its aftermath. So how does this affect you and why should you pay attention to this change?
First, as an individual, if you do not carry health insurance, you are currently paying a penalty of $695/adult not covered and $347.50/uninsured child with penalties going even as high as $2085/household. These penalties have been the deciding factor for most uninsured Americans—go broke buying insurance but they have insurance, or go broke paying a fine and still be uninsured. With the repeal signed in December 2017, these penalties are zeroed out starting January 1, 2019. While it seems that the repeal of the tax penalty should be good news all around, it does have some ramifications. Without reform in the healthcare arena for balanced pricing, when individuals make a mass exodus in 2019, we can expect higher premiums to account for the loss of insured customers.
As a business, you are still under the Employer Mandate of the ACA. There have been no changes to the coverage guidelines and reporting requirements of this Act. However, with healthy people opt-ing out of health insurance coverage, the employer premiums can expect to be raised to cover the increased expenses of the sick. Some do predict the possibility of the repeal of some parts of the Employer Mandate —specifically PCORI fees and employment reporting. The Individual and Employer Mandates were created to compliment each other and so changes to one tend to mean changes to the other.
So, why should you pay attention to this change? Because the balance the ACA Individual Mandate was designed to help make in the health insurance marketplace is now unbalanced. Taking one item from the scale results in instability. Both employers and employees will be affected by this tax repeal in one way or another.
We are currently living in a low-trust society as a whole — we keep hearing that news is fake, science is fake, and so on. That makes it hard for us to trust anyone and is why we need to work on building trust in the workplace more than ever. Human resources professionals and business leaders have an imperative to instill a culture of trust — not just because it is key to employee engagement, satisfaction, and performance, but also because it’s just the most human thing to do.
When you look at the foundations of trust, they are simple: People want to trust that they are going to be treated with respect, that their leaders are credible, and what they do matters. They want to know that they are secure.
There are three building blocks of trust: protection, presence, and progress. I call them my “Three Ps.”
Protection
Feeling protected is a foundational need. To earn the trust of someone else, you need to provide this protection. Your employees want to feel that the organization and their bosses are looking out for them, and that they genuinely care. Underlying the protection we all need and desire are “BLT” (just like the comforting feeling of the classic BLT sandwich): balance, love, and truth. When people feel protected, they are going to demonstrate kindness, loyalty, courage, and generosity.
When you don’t instill a sense of protection, it will stifle innovation and slow down the organization.
Presence
Presence is simple. It’s literally being present in all your interactions — meetings, one-on-one discussions, and interviews. We talk a lot about mindfulness these days, but it extends beyond the personal to the relational. Today, it feels like no one is ever present — we are all tuned in to our devices all the time. So turn off your computer, phone, tablet, watch, etc. when someone comes into your office, stay focused in conversations, and don’t bring your devices to meetings. Put your attention into what you value. Enjoy the present moment and truly experience it.
Lack of presence sends a message of lack of trust.
Progress
As humans, we constantly make progress, minute by minute. We want to know that we are moving in the right direction. How are we helping our employees make progress? Are we focused on helping them move ahead? Supporting your employees’ efforts and making progress is vital to helping them feel that you care about them fundamentally.
I have a personal philosophy of growth and recommend setting weekly growth plans. I pick one personal topic, like last week was protein, and I investigate to understand it. I also pick one work topic, like running better meetings and investigate that for the week. It’s not complicated — just pick a topic and spend the week growing at it.
Ask the Right Questions
Communicating needs is important, but it takes trust to do that. One way to develop the three Ps of trust is by asking the right questions, then really listening to the answers and acting on them. It shows you care and that you want to help people not feel like they are stranded or drowning. It tells your staff it’s safe to say that they are overwhelmed or hung up somewhere, or they don’t have the answers.
Questions for one-on-ones can include: Protection
How is life?
Do you have any decisions you are hung up on?
Am I giving you the resources or information you need to do your job?
Do you have too much on your plate?
Presence
What are you worried about right now?
What rumors are you hearing?
Would you like more or less direction from me?
Progress
If you could pick one accomplishment to be proud of between right now and next year, what would it be?
What are the biggest time-wasters you encounter?
What type and amount of feedback works best for you?
“Design thinking” is a fairly common term. Even if the phrase is new to you, it’s reasonably easy to intuit how it works: design thinking is a process for creative problem solving, utilizing creative tools like empathy and experimentation, often with a strong visual component. The term dates from 1968 and was first used in The Sciences of The Artificial, a text written by Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon.
For Simon, design thinking involved seven components, but today it’s usually distilled to five: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. In this way, creative tools are employed to serve individuals in a group, with a solution-driven focus. It’s important to note that these components are not necessarily sequential. Rather, they are specific modes, each with specific tools that contribute equally to solving an issue.
Most significantly, as Steve Boese of HR Executive noted in a recent column, design thinking is a rising trend in HR leadership. “Those using this strategy,” he says, “challenge existing assumptions and approaches to solving a problem, and ask questions to identify alternative solutions that might not be readily apparent.”Design thinking helps teams make decisions that include employees in meaningful ways, personalize target metrics, work outside the box, and produce concrete solutions. Even teams with established, productive structures use design thinking in the review process, or to test out expanded options.
Boese says that the key shift design thinking offers any team is the opportunity to troubleshoot solutions before they’re put into real-time practice. The main goal of design thinking is not process completion, low error rates, or output reports, as with other forms of HR technology, but employee satisfaction and engagement. More often than not, this leads to increased morale and even more opportunities for success.
by Bill Olson
Originally posted on ubabenefits.com
