Employers’ Increased Reliance on HDHPs

[Brian Anderson]

Posted an article (link below) with stats about more and more employers shifting to high-deductible health plans and shifting more of the costs to employees. Not exactly news I know, but was interesting to see some of the new stats. Like 1 in 4 employers have already implemented HDHPs as their ONLY benefit option for employees – a 40% increase over 2014.

And Millennials are most likely to choose a HDHP, but a lot of them aren’t taking advantage of HSA options.

Curious as to whether all this mirrors your experience or not?

Insurance Forums | 52% of large employers now offer HDHPs as companies increasingly shift financial responsibility to employees

 

[junkman]

Old news. We set one up at the agency at the 1st renewal where HDHps became available. We also took the highest OOP possible. You may as well go all the way if your intent is to save money. The question was "is this incremental benefits increase worth the incremental Premium increase?" The answer was "NO" until we reached the max OOP which was $5,000 at the time.

The next step is to actually save the premium dollars to have them available when the time comes. HSAs serve that function. I have been relatively healthy and have always max funded the HSA. A friend of mine with another agency is not so healthy. We both had the same knowledge level, the ability to choose any plan design with any carrier and final decision making authority. We chose the exact same plan from the same carrier.

Whether you have decent income or don't, if you're paying a significant amount of the premium, the numbers lead to the same place. Unfortunately, nothing that has been and nothing on the near horizon has any hope of stemming the continual cost inflation in the healthcare field that underlies premium increases. Who remember delivering the 1st renewal that broke the $100/month Employee Only premium?