The Problem with Healthcare Costs

In the last 20 years, the average monthly single premium has nearly quadrupled from $183 to $599, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In addition, the Rand Corporation found that ten years of family income growth were completely wiped out by increased premiums coming out of employee paychecks, and the out-of-pocket costs families have to pay when getting care. 

In addition to the devastating impact on your employees, these skyrocketing costs have stunted the growth of businesses and non-profits alike, crowded out investment in other critical organizational initiatives, and created a drag on earnings for decades now. Because of the exponential compounding on what is already your second or third largest expense, healthcare costs are the expense that has the most potential to put an organization out of business.

Even an innocent-sounding renewal increase of 6-7% will cause your healthcare costs to double again in ten to twelve years. Doing nothing is not an option!

Fall River is Here to Help

We know how frustrating these constant increases can be, so we’ve built a process to help employers fight back. Before launching Fall River in 2005, our founder spent nearly fifteen years as an actuary, underwriting executive, and consultant, handing out thousands of renewals to employers all over the country. She learned who gets good renewals, who gets bad ones, and why. This insider knowledge enables us to help our clients create benefits that are affordable, compliant, and easy to administer.

Like any great business strategy, effective healthcare management strategies must combine short-term and long-term approaches.

Strategies to Find Immediate Savings

Anyone can reduce your healthcare costs by slashing your benefits; that’s just cost-shifting. Instead, we use our insider knowledge of benefits to help you find more creative solutions that don’t take anything away from your team members. These strategies involve taking a closer look at your plan design, network, and incentives to ensure that employees get as good of a plan as they have today, but at a lower cost to the employer. 

Sometimes just rearranging the way you design your plan can result in a nice break from the insurance company, without forfeiting any benefits for your team.

Strategies to Bend Trends Over Time

Once you’ve received some immediate relief with creative benefit designs, we then implement research-proven strategies to proactively manage your healthcare costs throughout the year. These strategies address three core underlying problems of our healthcare system: 

• Too much healthcare is delivered in inefficient settings like hospitals and ER’s

• Plan members lack the understanding or incentive to seek the best value when getting care

• More members are struggling with chronic health conditions than ever before

We help you put it all together in a multi-year blueprint to address these underlying cost drivers. We’ll help you drive care to more efficient settings, educate your employees to be better consumers of your healthcare dollars, and design effective incentives for members to get healthier. We even offer solutions that will guarantee you an ROI on your cost containment efforts.

Fall River Clients Already Have these Strategies Built In

For existing Fall River clients, these strategic plans are built in at every renewal - which is why we start four to six months early so we can help you hone your winning strategy while delivering all your open enrollment guides and meetings, online HRIS setup, and member ID Card delivery right on time.

What If I’m Not (Yet) a Client?

For employers with 25-500 employees enrolled in a medical plan who aren’t part of the Fall River Family today, we can help you save money too! Learn how to take advantage of these powerful creative strategies to reduce your healthcare costs with a Fall River Health Plan Review (HPR) that will evaluate your current benefit plans and suggest ways to save. 

Contact us to get started on your Health Plan Review now!

We’ve been modeling out these scenarios for a number of employers, and the savings can be extensive depending on your current plan design. These scenarios showed one employer could save $600,000 while actually lowering their employees’ out-of-pocket max!

How will you spend your savings?

1. Shore up your bottom line
2. Reduce your employee contributions
3. Make your plan even richer

If you don’t already have this kind of process built into your annual renewal the way Fall River clients do, you owe it to yourself to see where you could be saving. Especially for employers who have a January 1 or December 1 renewal, now is the time to look under the hood, before you get into the busiest months leading up to your renewal date.

Don’t let skyrocketing healthcare costs hold your organization back. Contact us to Schedule Your Health Plan Review now!