Employer Alternatives to Healthcare Marketplaces

In a post from Sheryl Southwick, the Director of Compliance at TriNet, on The Insitute for Healthcare Consumerism’s website, she addresses the 5 things small and mid-sized businesses should NOT do in light of health reform.
The best piece of advice?
#4. Don’t believe it will be easy for employees to get health insurance from the government: There will be marketplaces (or exchanges) where everyone will be able to buy health care without the exclusion clauses of the past. However, employees will have to navigate these marketplaces. The application process is likely going to be pretty arduous and premium costs are still unknown. Your employees may have a negative experience with the process. (To read the rest of the article, click here.)
So many individuals and even employers assumed that health reform would be a process that actually improved access to care. The reality is, that new programs such as this take time to become seamless. Think about the first iterations of the internet, how slow browsing used to be and how far we have come since dial-up. Our healthcare system is equally, if not more, complex, so it makes sense that there might be challenges, now and in the future. So, what can you do in the meantime?
Provide resources for your employees to compare physicians and procedures. Giving them access to price and quality transparency tools, such as ours. For a longer list of other consumer-driven healthcare websites, check out our article from earlier this month.