What Does the Future Hold for Wellness Benefits?
By Heather Garbers
Wellness benefits are a hot topic in our industry. They typically pay the member $25-$100 (once per covered person, per year) for completing a covered health screening. Our friends at Sydney Consulting Group have shared that $15 is the average annual rate load to a policy when a $50 Wellness Benefit is offered. In the eyes of the insurer, this is a benefit worth paying as it will hopefully lead to health interventions and earlier stage diagnosis that will help to avoid larger claims for untreated conditions down the line. Sounds great right? What could be the downside of getting a portion of your premium back each year for completing a health screening, which we should all be doing anyways? Many people successfully use this as a bribe to get their spouses to actually get that annual physical. Some in our industry spend more time educating employees on the benefit of these wellness benefits, than on the benefits of the actual supplemental health product they are offering. We also know that Wellness benefits continue to be positioned and marketed in our industry as double dipping tax schemes, which are fraudulent in the eyes of the IRS. You can learn more about these in this article from Aflac, and I encourage everyone to be aware of these, too good to be true, “tax savings” strategies, know how to identify them and avoid them.
Personally, I see the value of offering wellness benefits on supplemental health plans not only based on how they promote preventative treatments and literally save lives, but also how they help with persistency rates. Employees tend to cancel coverage they “do not use” (forgetting that they initially purchased coverage to prepare themselves for an unexpected medical event, which isn’t likely to happen every year), where a $25-$100 benefit for completing a covered health screening results in them “using” the plan each year. Then if a covered event happens, they have a benefit that will help them to remain financially stable and pay for treatment. On the other hand, we also know that unfortunately, many times wellness benefits go uncollected as employees forget to file their claims. This is improving as carriers and the brokerage community are banding together to make the claim process easier for the member. We are seeing more widespread adoption of auto-filing this benefit based on a census from the employer, claim nudges, and claim integration to be the new standard in the marketplace, but we still have a long way to go. What we do know is that carriers that will auto-file wellness benefits based on completion of corporate bio-screenings or who follow the honor system for filing wellness claims (no EOB required), do see much higher utilization on these benefits.
