HELP WANTED: Entire Nation Seeks Creativity, Innovation to Solve Employer-Based Healthcare Conundrum
(Can you start tomorrow?)
Is this why Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway came together this week to announce the formation of a company to attack, as Warren Buffett says, “ballooning costs of (health care) act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy”?
From Fortune 500 to small Midwest businesses, the market seeks our industry’s creativity and innovation to battle everything in the status quo that is churning benefit plan mediocrity and stifling company growth. What do today’s creativity and innovation look like in reality? In our view, we need to look deeper into the thinking and model(s) driving low performance, break it all down and add a broad range of strategies to attack the tapeworm. Value is not being created by transferring risk from one insurance company to another.
- Radical employee engagement: Juicy employee incentives inside and outside of the plan for behaviors and outcomes employers want to reward.
- Target top conditions the plan is managing and match up the highest quality, lowest cost providers locally or regionally. Match up incentives to drive behaviors.
- Pharmacy. Pharmacy. Pharmacy. With the relentless cost of existing and new drugs combined with opaque supply chain, never stop looking for the $$$ here.
Our advice: create a culture of change in your plan, be bold and not afraid to try new ideas. To quote a recent client, “perfection is the enemy of good”.