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The More You Know, The Less You Owe

 

Time to Hit the Books!

Welcome to Self-Funded Health Insurance 101

The dramatic rise in health insurance costs over the past few years have caused many public sector organizations to find innovative ways to continue offering quality health benefits to their employees. With no end to the increases in sight, we chose to take a new approach to health benefits – our health plan is now self-funded.

What’s a self-funded health plan?
A self-funded plan, as its name implies, means you will now pay covered health care claims ourselves up to a certain limit. Our organization is insured for claims over that limit.

All in all, not a whole lot changes for you – you still get the high-quality health benefits you’ve come to expect. But now, we all have new opportunities for stabilizing healthcare costs that weren’t possible before.

So, why’d we choose to move to a self-funded plan? Here are a few helpful resources that’ll help you understand how self-funded plans work:

  • Increased overall savings potential
    • Funding our own health plan allows us to simply pay claims that happen instead of paying for claims that could.
    • It also gives us the opportunity to bypass the high-cost elements of traditional insurance plans – like administrative fees, premium taxes, and the extra costs normally charged by insurance companies to increase their profit margins.
  • We get more flexibility in plan design
    • Switching to a self-funded plan allows us to customize our plan to offer the features you want while avoiding wasteful spending.
  • You get more control over your health care costs
    • With fully insured health plans, there isn’t much anyone can do about the increasing costs of the plan. The premiums (cost of insurance) is just going to continue to go up every year.
    • Self-funding gives all of us the chance to control the future premiums. How? First, by staying healthy. By living an active and healthy lifestyle, we can prevent many of the chronic diseases that normally drive up overall premiums – keeping our costs low and our members healthy.
    • Also, with self-funded plans, we can provide you with unique, cost-saving tools that can reduce your own personal healthcare expenses, while contributing to the overall plan’s savings.
    • And finally, by being savvy consumers of healthcare, we can keep costs down and still get the quality healthcare we deserve.

In the end, we all want the same thing – access to high-quality healthcare at a reasonable cost. And we know that we can accomplish this goal by working together. For more information on self-funding, click on one of the following links:

Video: Introducing: Self-Funded Insurance

Article: How a Self-Funded Medical Plan Works

Keep an eye on your inbox! You’ll receive another email containing helpful healthcare savings information once per month.