Month: June 2020

Healthcare Brokers

A Hidden Obstacle in Controlling Healthcare Costs: Brokers

Posted on by jabittan
If you are a large company, you probably don’t have one person or department contacting various insurance agencies, hospitals, and pharmacies to get everything in place for the health insurance you provide to your employees. You likely work with a broker who is your agent in negotiating with insurance and healthcare companies. They help you understand the contract you sign with a carrier, and if you are going the self-insured route, they likely help navigate hospital and pharmacy contracts as well.

 

The broker you choose can greatly influence how much your company is going to pay for the health insurance provided to employers, for the administration of a self-insured plan, and even for individual services with providers. Brokers often position themselves as buyers agents, that is as representatives of the company looking to purchase coverage or administration, however, many brokers are simultaneously working for hospitals or for insurance agencies. What’s more, the hospital or insurance agency might compensate the broker more than your company, making the broker more of sellers agent than a buyers agent. Dave Chase highlights and explains this in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call:

 

“Your business is just one piece of the total, but keeping it with the same carrier can boost the broker’s total compensation by 50% or more. Because this compensation isn’t specific to you, status quo brokers will often claim they’ve disclosed fees and commissions. But they are actually only disclosing your account-specific fees and commissions that may not even be the most significant piece of their overall compensation.”

 

If a broker is getting paid by an insurance carrier to keep your company with that carrier, then your chances of shopping around to find better alternatives are slim. Your broker is likely to encourage you to stick with your current carrier and accept whatever fee increase they present you with for next year’s coverage.

 

Chase continues, “Forward-looking brokers have sent me letters from insurance carriers saying they’d be fired when they spoke the truth about egregious practices the carrier was inflicting on the broker’s clients. This makes it clear that the carriers view brokers as a quasi-employee they can fire at will. In other works, they are working for the carrier, not your organization.”

 

The company that Dave Chase runs can help you identify trustworthy and high quality brokers. If you select a broker at random or just because you have a good relationship with them, you run the risk of working with someone who is not as independent as you think. The connections and world of insurance carriers and brokers is complex, and navigating it successfully on your own is challenging.

 

At another point, when addressing brokers, Chase writes, “You should always ask your benefits broker or claims administrator if a local hospital is a client, as that is a clear conflict of interest, especially when the hospital itself owns the insurance carrier.”

 

It is clear to me that the healthcare industry has too many entities that are tied together in unclear ways. If we hope to change the system in the future to be more equitable, to reduce prices, and to actually provide quality services, these status quo relationships will have to be broken up. That might be a task the government can solve, but Chase would argue that companies have the tools to do that work as well, they often just don’t utilize the leverage that they have.
The Specter of Rationing Care

The Specter of Rationing Care

Posted on by jabittan
American’s fear having to wait for anything. We want to order things from the comfort of our own home and have them delivered in two days. We don’t want to wait behind more than three people in line at the grocery store, and we don’t want to wait for medical care (to be honest these are all examples from my own life – not picking on anyone who isn’t like me here). Our fear of waiting is used as a reason against universal health coverage. We are told about Canadians who cross to the United States to have surgeries that they would have to wait several months to have in Canada. We are told that we won’t be able to schedule an immediate primary care appointment if more people were to have access to health care. And we are told that the high costs of medical care stop unnecessary care from happening, preventing us from having to wait to see a doctor.

 

However, these fears of waiting and the specter of rationing care presented to us in these scenarios is overblown. It is true that some Canadians chose to get care in the United States for elective procedures, but presenting that fact to us in isolation is misleading and done in bad faith. The reality of our waiting for care is much more complex. Dave Chase does a good job of explaining it in his book The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, “People often raise the specter of rationing care. In reality, it’s overuse (i.e., unnecessary and potentially harmful care) that leads to reduced access by squandering enormous financial resources that would be better used for individuals who actually need care and can’t get it.”

 

We act as though our healthcare system is following good market incentives to find a good balance between wait times and receiving the right care. But we often fail to acknowledge that our healthcare system isn’t performing like an ideal market, and that it often pushes people to too much of the wrong type of care. Chase details this in his book with unnecessary back surgeries. Those who have a legitimate need for a back surgery might have to wait, because primary care providers get a bonus when they refer patients to orthopedic surgeons who are paid to operate. The right path for a patient might be physical therapy, but the money for the providers is in the surgery.

 

We should not raise the specter of rationing care when we are so wasteful with the care we provide through our current system. We waste a lot of money when we don’t have a concern about rationing care, and when we reward providers for doing more surgeries, prescribing more pills, and offering more treatment, even if the efficacy isn’t proven. In his book, Chase doesn’t advocate for a universal coverage system with healthcare covered by the federal government, but he does show how employers today can do more to ensure their patients get more of the good care (the effective PT and preventative check-ups) for free. This reduces the demand on the expensive and unproven treatments later on, and actually reduces the demand on the system for services that we are afraid of rationing.