How corporate health insurance policies can be improved

The issues related to healthcare insurance have become a very polarizing and contentious issue over the last few years. Namely, the COVID- pandemic has exacerbated an already antagonistic issue between the healthcare industry, consumers and government. Here rising healthcare costs are harming the discretionary income of both consumers and society at large. Currently healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP is roughly 17%. Projections indicate that by the year 2030 healthcare costs will be 20% of GDP. The COVID-19 pandemic saw higher healthcare expenditures as consumers battled life threatening viruses and complications. High levels of inflection, reluctance from consumers to adhere to mask mandates, and a general ambivalence towards the virus helped to cause further increases in healthcare costs. This was ultimately compounded by business closures but further pressures on individual incomes and savings rates. Ultimately, this all culminated into a short, yet severe economic contraction throughout the world (Beam, 2012).

To combat this problem the management problem identified was to help increase adoption of healthcare insurance programs within a corporate setting. Here, the idea is to leverage the insurance programs to help educate employees of the benefits of coverage. In addition, the corporate policy will allow employees to more easily opt-in to any applicable insurance coverage program. The primary adjustment will be related to the education and overall evaluation of insurance program options. Although small, management will mandate that all employees attend a benefits session to ensure that they are up to date on the latest insurance coverage policies. This is critical for both the individual and the company. For one, the company benefits from a much healthier employee work force. This ultimately helps to mitigate losses associated with absenteeism, lack of productivity, and overall contagion risk to other employees. From the employee perspective, they are gaining valuable insurance coverage to help the lower the adverse consequences that ultimately can occur unexpectedly related to health. This is particularly helpful as healthcare expenditures continue to increase and take a large percentage of consumer incomes within the United States (Bikolf, 2013).

By making this slight adjustment of mandating employee attendance and selection of insurance programs the company can help serve the needs of all stakeholder groups involved. To accomplish this goal of mandating benefit meeting attendance, the company will need to allocate resources into appropriate oversight. This oversight will require resources being allocated to the human resources department. These resources will be used to first schedule benefits representatives who will provide in person overviews of the insurance packages provided to the company. The schedules will occur over a two-week time horizon. Next, resources will be allocated toward communicating the scheduled sessions, taking attendance at the sessions, and ensuring all corporate employees understand the importance of attendance. Communications will primarily occur in an electronic format through email correspondence. Here, the human reources team must ensure 100% compliance with this initiative while providing clarification as to the reasoning an employee didn’t attend (Biswas, 2012).