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Expertise in a Package: A Consulting Blog

What do you do when your business needs input from an expert, but you don't have the funds to hire a full-time employee with that specific expertise? You hire a consultant, of course! You can find consultants who specialize in everything from accounting to efficiency. Hire one for a week, or hire one for a year. They can perform the necessary duties and lend their expertise while they are there, and when they are done, they'll move on to another job. To learn more about consulting and the benefits of hiring a consultant, check out the articles on this website — they discuss a wide range of consulting-related topics.

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Expertise in a Package: A Consulting Blog

Protect Your Employees -- Speak With A Health Insurance Consultant About Improved Coverage

by Carmen Fisher

Companies are about to start offering open enrollment for health insurance for employees again, and that means it's time for those companies to look at the plans they want to offer for the next year. Sometimes the current plans are working well, and the company chooses to offer them again. However, sometimes the plans currently offered by the company are not going to be available to the companies after the end of the year, or the plans currently offered garner only complaints from the employees. In those cases, the company needs to find better plans, and a health insurance consultant can help the company sift through the mountain of jargon and mixed benefits to find the best options.

Better Coverage of Diagnostic Tests

If the employees complained that the plans they had did not offer coverage for diagnostic tests, a priority for any human resources representative should be to find plans that offer better coverage for those. Despite the requirement that plans cover screening tests, many don't cover actual diagnostic tests until a deductible has been met. Diagnostic tests differ from screening in that the screening merely sees if anything is there that is of concern, while the diagnostic test actually diagnoses what that concerning thing is. Because so many screenings can easily turn into diagnoses, coverage for both of those tests before hitting a deductible is essential.

More Prescription Coverage up Front

Prescription costs are another issue that hit many people very hard when insurance plans were reformatted to meet ACA standards. Instead of owing a small co-pay for one refill per month, many people found themselves owing hundreds of dollars to fill a new deductible before coverage for prescriptions kicked in. Group plans fared a little better, but some remained very basic and problematic. Companies need to ensure that their employees can get some prescription costs covered from the very first dispensing.

More Reasonable Premiums Relative to the Plan's Benefits

Another issue many employees have faced are growing premiums. While group insurance premiums started off relatively low when the ACA was implemented, they have grown steadily, with employees shouldering a bigger burden each year. CNBC reported in 2019 that employees paid about 67 percent more for health care in 2019 than they did 10 years before that. Growing monthly premiums are partly to blame. You want your employees to have good coverage, but they do need to be able to pay all their bills and not just the premium contribution.

A health insurance consultant can find multiple plans that let your employees find the level of coverage they want along with premiums they can better handle. Sorting through all of the information can take too much of your time. Letting a consultant deal with the details makes the process a lot easier for you.

To learn more, contact a health insurance consulting company.

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