This is Part 3 of Binder HR's 3 part group benefits series. Part 1, Beginner: Your First Group Benefits Plan, starts with a small business buying coverage for the first time. Part 2, Intermediate: Your Benefits Plan Is Now Big Enough to Manage, looks at a medium employer using claims history and renewal data more actively. This final article moves to the financing and governance questions available to a large organization. Large employers can ask a question smaller groups often cannot. Which parts of the benefits plan actually need to be insured? That is different from asking which benefits employees should receive. An organization can preserve the same promise to employees while changing who funds the claims, who administers them and where catastrophic risk sits. Separate the benefit from the financing Health and dental plans contain a mixture of relatively predictable claims and much less predictable risk. Routine dental, vision and paramedical claims can become statistically more stable across a large population. A catastrophic drug claim, a prolonged disability or a concentration of unusual claims behaves differently.
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