The costs that employers can’t ignore.

Back in the olden days of Healthcare Insurance, when we mostly paid our own monthly premiums, if we could even qualify for it, we each did the most we could to bring down our monthly payments. We managed our own policies.

Certainly, those employees that worked for really large corporations, were union members or government employees didn’t have to worry about that stuff, someone else negotiated that benefit most of the time and you paid what portion you were told to.  Maybe you didn’t contribute anything. But the per person costs were somewhat lower than they are now.

The government has decided that employers now have to bear the burden of those premiums and they go up year after year. These healthcare costs present the number one obstacle for businesses to grow.  Employers have got to be searching for tools to reduce these burdensome costs. Health Payer News reports that some are bribing their employees with bonuses to their health savings accounts or to utilize biometric screening

We’ve pointed out repeatedly that the cost of not taking prescriptions on time and as directed creates Non-Adherence for a patient and that costs 13% loss of the total care of healthcare. Now that employers are having to pay for these costs, they must also be looking at ways to affect the cost of non-adherence.

For the sake of understanding this huge, unnecessary cost, allow me to paint a really oversimplified picture: If a company has 10,000 employees and it pays $1,000 a month in insurance premiums for the employee and family members, we could easily be talking about a cost range of $120 to 130 million plus per year. It suddenly makes sense for a company to create wellness programs because the best way to not have premiums go up is to keep the population fit and healthy.

13% (of total health care costs of ANY population) of said $120 million is $15.6 million. That’s the ridiculous cost of the company’s employees simply not taking their meds as directed. 69% of those that didn’t take their meds is just because they forgot. 69% of $15.6 million equals $10.7 million. If you are the employer wouldn’t you want to save $10.7 million dollars annually if you could? I rounded these numbers for the simplicity of it, so that you could follow the mathematical logic.  The real numbers are typically a bit higher.

So… if you employ only 1,000 people on your staff, you’d be looking to save $1 million+.  If you employ 100 people you’d be able to save $100k+… simply by using a tool that could get your employees to take their meds as prescribed by their doctors.

If that isn’t a wake up call enough for you… consider that your employees sick days and productivity loss costs are even greater.