Reducing health costs for your business

Reducing health costs for your business begins with taking a close look at what kinds of health costs are most significant to your business.Employers need to take a customized approach to reducing business health costs if they are to manage their current health care costs and avoid the financial strain that comes with the ever increasing rise in costs when it comes to protecting your employees.While smaller companies are choosing to switch to lower quality health plans, other business are opting to stop paying for health insurance all together, leaving their employees to fend for themselves.However, there are also businesses (generally the larger ones) that realize that the resulting costs of doing something drastic to employee health care can have far worse consequences than if you were to create a program designed to reduce expenses in the form of the money that is spent on health care issues that can be prevented.There are ways to reduce health costs for your business without losing the quality health care that your employees need.Here are just a few examples of things that you can do to reduce your health costs without sacrificing quality care and coverage.

Managing prescription drug costs

For the ill or the elderly, prescription drug costs make up a considerable amount of money that is spent on health care.There are also other members of the population who are not ill or elderly but may occasionally need an expensive prescription that can really put a strain on finances.One major thing that you can do is to promote the use of generic prescriptions for participating employees.All that employees need to do is to talk with their physicians to see if there is a less costly alternative for a drug that can still do the job.Additionally, even when your insurance covers medication, there can be drugs that are not as inexpensive as you may think.Many times prescription drugs are calculated based on a tiered system.In short, this means that even with insurance, you could be left spending a fortune on medications.Another suggestion is to encourage employees to really think about how much of a drug is necessary.After talking with your physician you and your doctor may decide that you could do with less medication, thereby saving money through consuming less.

Implement a wellness program

Another way to dramatically improve healthcare costs is to implement wellness plans with health screening, prevention and education at its foundation.Healthy living, weight loss and smoking cessation are common components to a wellness program.Wellness programs can be individually tailored to meet the needs of any business, meaning that no matter your financial resources, there are wellness program items that anyone can implement successfully.Many wellness programs also implement an accountability and reward system.After all, you cannot force any employee to get healthy.However, you can definitely make being self motivated an advantage by offering public recognition and desirable rewards.

Empower employees to have greater control over how their health care dollars are spent with employer contributed HAS health plans

More and more companies are realizing the cost benefits of opting for high deductible health plans that have HAS dollars attached to them.This means that the employee is given a certain amount of employer contributed dollars in addition to premium money that they spend as they feel is best.Because there is a monetary difference depending on where you seek medical treatment, employees are made to be more aware of where their health insurance dollar goes and that means that less is spent on insurance.The employee is still able to receive quality health coverage but they have greater control over how their insurance money is spent.