Helping Consumers Choose Health Plans In Exchanges: Best Practice Recommendations

This is a re-post from Health Affairs published on their blog today 2/29/2012.  I thought it might be helpful to my readers.  I still have problems with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), because it still is a third party healthcare delivery system and not quality healthcare controlled by you and your doctor. 

Until you take responsibility for your who healthcare and stop wanting someone else to pay for it, you will not have the control of your care or the cost.  Their are option available but you will need to we willing to do the research and ask the right questions.  

Here are a few ideas:

1)  Go with a high deductible no frills plan to cover the major problems.

2)  Pay cash of your regular Doctor visits, and other routine expenses.

3)  Look at accident plans that pay per accident.  Example NACD (National Association of Consumers Direct)

4)  Add a program that gives you PPO discounts for your Doctor and other routine expenses, (lab, Rx, vision, Dental, etc.

For more information on your options go to JE Health Care Solutions web site and if you have questions just contact us.  We Are Here To Help You To Take Control of Your Healthcare.

Are You a Small Business Owner

As a small business owner you have many things to think about on a day to day basis.  But how often do you think about health care for you and your employee’s?  With health care insurance cost rising at such a high rate, it is becoming harder to be able to afford to offer health care benefits.  Unfortunately the trend on rising cost does not appear to be slowing down.  It is now estimated that 30% or more business’s are saying they will stop offering employer based health insurance to their employee’s in the near future due to the rising cost.  The Kaiser Foundation show the cost in 2011 to average over $14,000 per year per employee, for  family coverage. 

So as a small business owner what do you do?  You want to be able to offer employee benefits, but can you afford to keep doing it?  You do have options, you can drop health care as part of your benefit package, you can increase the employee share of the cost, are you can become creative, an find different combinations of programs to offer your employee’s.  There are several combinations available to you. 

1)      Go with a high deductible healthcare insurance with no dr. co-pay or any other add one’s, which will lower your cost.

2)      Add a discount program to it to lower the Dr. Visit cost.  With Dental, Visions, Rx, ECT. (you could let the employee pay for this thru payroll deduction)

3)      Enroll in an HRA program which would allow you to cover some of these costs for your employee (with a reimbursement arrangement) and use it as a tax savings for your company.

4)      Offer an accident plan to your employee’s that would pay per covered accident.

As you can see there are options that you can use.  JE Health Care Solutions can assist you with finding the right options.  We represent different companies such as Renco Direct, NACD (National Association of Consumers Direct), BaseHRA, and many others.

We at JE Health Care Solutions are here to work with you and your employee’s.  

The main thing you need to do as a business owner, is find out what programs will work for you and that you can afford.  By offering benefits to your employee’s you will be able to keep them.