Health Benefits

Health care coverage has been an important topic in recent years in America. This is important because according to the most recent U.S Census Bureau more than 50 million Americans are without healthcare insurance. There are many reasons why the numbers of uninsured Americans are too high but the most obvious reason that many American are without insurance is the loss of insurance through unemployment and employers dropping employer-based health insurance. Many employers are considering dropping health insurance all together or making workers pay for more than 47% of health care costs (Kaiser Family Foundation). Employers have to make sure that their workers have health insurance because sick employers will affect the bottom line. Poor health of employees will result in payment of sick days, lots of absenteeism, low productivity at work and sometimes older workers with poor health might take early retirement. Even though employers pay some of the cost of healthcare insurance for employees, they spend more money out of the indirect costs of poor health conditions of their employees. Therefore, a healthcare administration in any corporation has to look into many factors when evaluating the type of healthcare package that is offered to the company to make sure that it meets the needs of the company.

The kind of health care package and the quality of healthcare being offered are very important consideration to a health care benefits administrator. The employer has to be engaged and really focused on what is really important in terms of cost, quality and value. Health care is a commodity and so many corporations look at cost reduction as an approach to getting quality care. As a healthcare benefits administration, cost will be one of the variables that I'll evaluate when thinking of a healthcare package. I'll examine different health care vendors, 3rd party administrators and different type of health plans and they start to bargain to get the maximum discounts that I can for my company. Another way I'll evaluate a health care package is to calculate how much of the premium will be paid by the employer and what faction to pass to employees and what if the company will pay for drugs and whether it is necessary to cover all basic services or just a few.

Even though cost is an important variable in evaluating the quality of healthcare, a healthcare benefits administrator should also focus on value instead of just cost alone. The true cost of a health care package does not just include the immediate benefits, but also includes long-term cost of ongoing treatment and the indirect costs that employer incur for employee poor health(). As a health benefits analyst I will evaluate the best healthcare package by finding ways to improve the quality of care. One way I'll go about doing is to find health packages that will provide better diagnoses, provide employee with easy access to care and on time treatment. A package that will be flexible in finding treatments that are less invasive, providing the correct treatment to the correct patient and health care packages that have less complications. All these factors combined with lower head cost will be used to evaluate the quality of care that could be negotiated for the company.

Outcome measurement is "the systematic collection and analysis of information that is used to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention" (Clark