Good News On Insurance Renewal

Last week we met with our broker and learned that we are able to renew all lines of benefits coverage with no increase in cost.  As such we will also opt not to make any changes in insurance coverage. 

This doesn't come as a complete surprise.  We've been tracking our insurance plans' performance all year and we're running about 83% claims-to-premium.  That suggests a good renewal, but our last year with United Healthcare we had 84% and still received a 33% increase proposal. 

This year's good news comes mostly due to two things: very few high-dollar claims and a significant migration from the PPO plan to the High Deductible Plan.  The beauty of these results is that the overall cost of co-pays and coinsurance paid by our people is not significantly higher than last year.  This indicates smarter medical buying on the part of people in high deductible plans. It appears that, in aggregate, both workforce and employer saved money or at least held their costs static.

We will have our usual Open Enrollment period during the month of March.  There won't be much in the way of "new" information other than we'll continue to show people how the High Deductible Plan (and we're going to find another name for it) is the best plan for almost everyone.

More to come...

Jim

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