My best HR management idea: Making a dent in health costs
July 14, 2008 by Jim GiulianoPosted in: Incentives, Latest News & Views, Money, My best management idea
HR manager Eva Savidge kept running into a wall when trying to figure out how to make a dent in employees’ rising healthcare costs. Then she hit on an idea.
As part of an ongoing series, we’ll have practicing HR managers present real problems they faced and how they solved them. Here’s Eva Savidge’s.
Our problem was two-part but certainly not unique: (1) out-of-sight healthcare costs, and (2) employees who were unhappy about it.
As a midsize company, we weren’t able to do a lot to hold the line on company health costs, besides raising employee premiums and co-pays. We weren’t sure that we could make much headway toward solving the problems, but we figured we ought to show our employees that at least we were trying.
One way to start: A lot of our employees are over age 40, and having vision care was important to them. No, we couldn’t afford to add free vision care to our health plan, but we did the next best thing.
A healthy discount
We called a highly recommended local optician and asked what kind of deal he’d make us for checkups and eyeglasses if we promised to send all our employees to him. Turns out, his offer represented a healthy discount on the going rates.
We agreed to make him our exclusive eyecare provider and gave our employees his special rates.
The idea was an immediate hit. At the least, it provides employees with a bit of a break in their health costs – and they do appreciate the fact that we’re trying to make health care less expensive for them.
Tags: costs, Health care, vision care
March 30th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
We cut health insurance cost by appros $75,000.00 by using a self insured plan. We did not have to give up any coverage. The employee has to do some work as far as sending in receipts. We went through a company called Ben-e-lect to do the administration, even with their cost we saved that amount of money in one year.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:10 pm
We’re doing the same thing — this is our first year. The system would work well if the employees would have paid attention and done their part. Now, more than 6 months into the plan, I am spending hours every week trying to untangle the messes made by inattentive employees. The biggest offenders, of course, are the bosses.