Understanding Your Healthcare Costs

In order to lower your healthcare costs and contributions, all employees need to take better care of themselves, go to proper quality doctors, and take prescription medication as prescribed.

As we all know, health insurance costs in the United States continue to grow at a rate far greater than inflation! What you may not know, however, is that the healthcare premiums your employer pays may or will increase dramatically.

As an organization, it has been your employers’ objective to provide employees and their families with affordable, quality health insurance coverage.

We thought it was important that you had a little understating of health insurance premiums. We wanted to share some fact with you so you understand why premiums are so high. It’s not just that the health insurance companies make a lot of money: and it’s no longer a case that doctors and hospitals make that much money. Your employers’ group costs are based on the claims of our employees and their families. The healthier the employee group is, the lower our costs will be. If we really want to lower our healthcare costs and contributions we need to take better care of ourselves, go to proper quality doctors, and take prescription medications as prescribed.

The healthier our group is, the lower our costs will be.

Recently, Corporate Synergies completed a root-cause analysis on a potential clients experience to understand why they were paying high costs for insurance; the results were surprising to upper management:

• Among their covered employees and their dependents 327 people were NOT taking their medications – important drugs – as they were prescribed.
• 158 people are taking “duplicate therapy” – two drugs that essentially do the same thing and when taken together, create medical problems for those individuals.
• 30 people are taking medication prescribed by different physicians that will seriously and adversely impact their health. Two people are taking medication that interacts so badly, it may kill them.
• Over 20 people in the next two years will have an inpatient cardiovascular event (heart attack) that most likely could be averted today! That’s out of the 87 people that were identified to have cardiovascular disease.
• At least 420 people have diabetes.

We want you to live long healthy lives with affordable health insurance costs. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please also pass this on to your spouse. It is important that everybody support each other in this endeavor to control claims’ costs and our health.