A large employer in the transportation sector has recently gone to print promoting the fact that they have just arranged an employer paid healthcare cash plan for their 4,800 employees. To quote their spokesperson, ‘We felt that the time was right to introduce a wellbeing strategy to provide our staff with the help and benefits they will really use to help them manage their everyday healthcare bills’.
To be fair, I don’t know whether this purchase is part of a wider wellbeing strategy but to take the spokesperson’s words at face value, I get the impression that they believe this is their strategy. What are they doing to prevent their employees from having to claim in the first place and then having to pay for it?
As I’ve said elsewhere on Shandwell, I’m all for healthcare cash plans for the part they can play in an overall strategy. Providing low cost access to initial diagnosis, physiotherapy and counselling can be an economic way of managing health related problems when they occur.
But it seems to me that this employer is placing too much emphasis on the ‘fix’ rather than prevention.
It would have been really refreshing to hear them say that they had undertaken an assessment of the health and wellbeing of their employee base and as part of a management strategy based on the resulting data, they decided to pay for a healthcare cash plan because it met needs.
I could be wrong, but they may have just bought a product in isolation without a proper needs analysis, believing that this will provide them with the best return on investment. This very rarely proves to be the case.