Health Care Reform for the HR Professional
HR professionals are now entrenched in an entirely transformed healthcare delivery landscape. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) clearly will impact every stakeholder that currently delivers or supplies healthcare in the United States.
While the structural, financial, behavioral and market-based consequences of this sweeping storm of legislation will occur unevenly and are not fully predictable, this first round of healthcare legislation is designed to aggressively regulate and rein in insurance market practices that have been depicted as a major factor in our “crisis of affordability” and to expand coverage to an estimated 30 million uninsured.
Many HR professionals are getting hit from all angles – finding it difficult to continue to transfer rising costs to employees, unwilling to absorb double-digit trends, under-staffed to intervene in the health of their populations and uninspired to assume the role of market catalyst to eliminate the perverse incentives that reward treatment of chronic illness rather than its prevention – they must forge ahead to address the intended and unintended impacts on the estimated 180 million Americans covered under their employer-sponsored healthcare plans.
Consider the following as you brace for the “new normal.”
▪ Think Twice When Someone Suggests Dumping Health Coverage– Many smaller and razor-thin margin employers will be tempted to drop medical coverage and pay the $2,000 per full-time employee penalty – essentially releasing employees to buy guarantee-issue coverage through health exchanges, which will be available in 2014. Aside from impacting employers’ ability to attract and retain employees (consider how many of your employees will fall into the class of individuals eligible for federal subsidies), the assumption that the $2,000 will remain the baseline assessment per employee for those choosing to not offer coverage is a dangerous variable.
▪ Pay attention to Section 105(h) now. – Many employers may be unaware that self-funded plans that discriminate in favor of highly compensated employees must comply with Code Section 105(h) non-discrimination rules. As of the first plan year following September 23, 2010, these rules now will apply to non-grandfathered, fully insured plans. Insurers may choose to exercise their right to either load rates for potential adverse selection or decline to quote because employers have failed to meet minimum participation percentages. . Penalties for not complying with the new regulations are $100 per day per employee.
▪ Understand the sources of cost shifting pressure – As Congress and state governments wrestle with Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements and begin to focus on fraud, over-treatment and accountability for clinical outcomes, providers will feel the increasing pinch of reimbursement reform and will pivot in the direction of trying to shift costs to commercial insurance. HR professionals will need to better track employee utilization patterns for in-patient facilities especially in high-use urban and rural commercial hospitals that also derive a large percentage of their revenues from Medicare. If a hospital derives 60% of its revenues from government reimbursement and 40% from commercial insurance, proposed fee cuts will impact facility revenues and create pressure to cost shift to private insurance. An understanding of hospital utilization and consideration of tiered networks can help insulate your plans and drive lower costs.
▪ Don’t be intimidated by self-insurance – Many employers underestimate the advantages of self-insurance and overestimate its complexity and risk. But, in a post reform world, firms with more than 200 employees should give serious consideration to partial or total self-funding. Aside from the total transparency of fees, administrative expenses and pooling charges, employers own their own data. The sooner employers get comfortable with self-insurance as a risk financing strategy, the sooner HR professionals can construct loss control programs that can mitigate claims costs. By self-funding, employers may better manage their population’s health risk; may avoid a myriad of state-based mandates legislated to fund potential shortfalls should local exchanges prove inadequate to contain costs; and may increase flexibility with respect to plan design.
▪ Wellness Without Risk Management is Worthless. – Wellness has become a broad-brush term to describe any sponsored effort at health improvement. Forget wellness. Population risk management (PRM) is the operative term to describe a process of understanding embedded health risks and structuring plan designs to remove barriers to care and keep people healthy. PRM requires access to clinical data, cultural engagement and designs that have consequences for employees who do not engage. If employers do not understand the risk within their workforces, it is impossible to improve results or be confident that plan changes will drive a desired result. For example, more than 50 percent of claims arise out of modifiable risk factors and as few as five percent of employees drive 50 percent of claims.
▪ HR is a “Force of Influence”. – Employers purchase healthcare for more than 180 million Americans – about 60% percent of all individuals who have healthcare coverage, but ironically feel less empowered, informed or in control of their spending or their employees’ behavior as they access the system. HR professionals must become activists for public health improvement and change – promoting healthy behaviors, transparency and accountability while putting an end to public-to-private cost shifting, overtreatment, fraud, abuse and clinical variability.
As we hunker down and adopt this new legislation, the question for many in HR will be – will reform happen for you or happen to you?
