Rising Healthcare Costs for Employees

It used to be one of the major advantages of having a good job with a fortune 500 company as they basically payed for the healthcare costs of employees. However, the trend each year is to shift more and more of these rising healthcare costs to employees as subtly as possible. Employees really need to read the fine print of their company`s healthcare plans, and have money set aside for the real costs of these company supported plans.

The Good Old Days

When my mom worked for a fortune 500 company, there were no yearly deductibles or out of pocket expense deductibles; there was just a $5 copay for each doctor`s visit. Oh the glory days of great company healthcare plans. The next incremental step in this process of making employees subsidize more of these rising costs for companies was to raise the copay from $5 to $10 to $15 and so on depending upon your company and Insurance provider.

Incrementalism at its finest

The next brilliant idea borrowed from the Auto Insurance Industry was to create an annual deductible like $500 so as to offset some of these rising costs and shift more of the burden to employees. It is pretty easy to hit that $500 mark on an annual basis, and multiply this number by a large employee base and this is quite a profitable savings for companies.

But in what I call the ‘Consultantism’ of corporate America where it seems consultants have a larger influence on many strategic decisions and dream up creative ways to add ‘value’ to the bottom line of companies for a large fee of course the incrementalism of shifting healthcare costs didn`t stop there with the annual $500 deductible.

The next brilliant idea was to create another type of deductible in the ‘Out of Pocket Expenses’ Deductible. And the shiftiness of this move alone just screams “How can we market this increase to employees so they don`t bring out the pitchforks?” I realize there are some slight differences, but seriously, companies for all intents and purposes could just have raised the annual deductible.