A few more items plucked from the annual KFF survey regarding employer-based health plans, link in yesterday’s post. 57% of all companies are offering some form of health coverage in 2018, but for firms over 1000 workers, the number is about 100%, while for smaller companies with 3 to 9 employees it is 47%. However, 90% of all workers have access to a health plan at work. At companies that offer a health plan, about 79% of employees are eligible for the plan and of these, 76% actually enroll, so around 60% of all employees have enrolled in a health plan if it is available and 53% of all employees have a work-related health plan. Lack of eligibility may be due to part-time status or other factors, and not enrolling is often due to having another form of coverage, for example, through a spouse. Almost every company, large or small, with a health plan allows the employee to enroll a spouse and children. 13% of firms offer an inducement to workers to enroll in a spouse’s plan and 16% offer such inducements to just not participate in the company’s health plan.
Health risk assessments are offered by 37% of smaller companies and 62% of larger ones, with 51% of the large employers providing an incentive for completing the HRA. Similarly, 21% of small firms and 50% or larger ones offer biometric screenings, with 60% of larger ones giving an incentive for participation and 15% rewarding or penalizing employees for specific outcomes on the tests. 52% of small companies and 82% of larger ones offer at least one wellness program and 35% of the large companies offer incentives for involvement in wellness, but the incentives generally are relatively small. 74% of large companies pay for telemedicine services; 76% for care received at a retail clinic and 10% have an onsite health clinic, with most of those who do allowing that clinic to be used for non-work-related medical care. 17% of large firms use a high-performance or tiered network design, while 5% offer at least one narrow-network design. But only 3% eliminated a hospital from their network. Can’t expect a lot better results if you aren’t willing to dump high cost providers, but then again, given the consolidation that has occurred, it is hard to eliminate them.
