Employee Health

How You Should Evaluate Health Insurance Plans

It’s a well-known fact around the world that employees are more likely to stay working in your company if they’re happy with their health insurance plan. According to a survey, 92% of employees pay attention to insurance plans facilitated by employers. This is why it’s so important for companies to evaluate their health insurance plans.
In 2019, 40.4 million out of the 288 million of insured Indians were insured by their
employers. Because of new regulation, it’s now mandatory for all employees that are functioning after the lockdown to provide health insurance. That means 200+ million professionals will need to be ensured this year alone.
Evaluate your current policy
To evaluate the value of your company’s health insurance plans, you need to ask
yourself some very important questions. The purpose of the health policy is twofold —to increase productivity (by keeping people healthy) and to create a great corporate culture (employee appreciation).

Questions to ask yourself:

1. What percentage of your employees actually use this benefit each year?
2. Has my insurance partner helped increase awareness of the benefit among
   employees?
3. Is this policy really keeping people healthy, and therefore productive?
4. What are other ways I can make better employee health more frequently? (offer OPD cover, pay for medicines, etc)

You want your company’s health insurance to keep employees productive by managing risks, to build a culture of caring, and to attract the best talent out there. If your insurance is not helping you achieve these things, you need to figure out why.

In many cases, I’ve seen that employees don’t even know the name of their health insurance provider. HR teams pay many lakhs each year to ensure coverage and the staff has no idea it’s even available! This could mean you’re not generating awareness or that your broker is not helping you very much. Another reason may be that your employees simply don’t care about traditional health insurance, which typically only covers hospitalization. They see it as a standard offer and it doesn’t affect how productive they will be.

This is where it’s important to receive feedback directly from your employees. HRs should have built the communication channels to be able to ask how the employee health insurance plan is being perceived. Are employees even aware of it? Do they know how to use it? Their opinion matters.

Insurance is Broken

What we’ve learned from taking a closer look at health insurance is that insurance is broken. Policy prices are increasing every year and utilization of this benefit among employees is actually low. This is mainly because healthcare in the workplace is usually defined by preventive care. This means taking care of employees before they need to go to the hospital and preventing expensive health situations.

Make a better choice this year

It’s the HR Department’s job to make sure that employees are taken care of in every
aspect; health insurance plans are a central part of this. This is why it’s important t
listen to the needs of your employees and find the best way to support them. In this
case, this means finding the right insurer, the one that provides great value at affordable prices, and allows you to engage your employees in their health more frequently.
You may decide that company culture can be improved if primary healthcare coverage is provided for employees across the board, which includes preventive care.