In a self-funded group health plan, you as the employer eliminate obligations to an insurance carrier by assuming the risk of providing financial health care benefits to your employees yourself. This is an ideal setup for business managers who are willing to assume more risk to hopefully see a higher payoff at the end of the year. Self-funding is most effective when you have a trusted advisor like GIS who can help you to understand the data and optimize your health care spend.

Why Self-Fund Your Plan

Using a self-funded group health care model gives you more control over your benefits plan and prevents you from paying for services you do not need. There are several advantages to going this route including reduced overhead costs, tax savings, legal preemptions, freedom of choice, stop-loss options, and improved cash flow.

Self-funding gives you more choice. You can hand select the benefits you want to provide your employees instead of accepting the pre-packaged set of benefits that comes with an insurance policy. You will enjoy custom design and flexible plan administration, whether you coordinate coverage from within your organization or choose to outsource.

Complete Customization

One of the greatest assets of the self-funded group health care plan is being able to structure benefits according to the needs of your business.

You can choose whether or not you want to cover health care, dental, short-term disability, prescription drugs, and vision care. Perhaps you will opt to self-fund some benefits and insure others through traditional means. You also have the final say when it comes to eligibility, exclusions, cost-sharing, policy limits, and retiree benefits.

At GIS, we have many customizable strategies that can be deployed to make your self-funding plan run as efficiently as possible. We apply each of these strategies based on your industry as well as the unique needs and values of your business.

Importance of Claims Analysis

Traditional health insurance typically comes in a neat little package. As a result, you may have some benefits built in that you are paying for, whether they are beneficial to your business or not. In our self-funding model, we have a dedicated account management team that dives into the data and takes a look at the type of claims driving the highest overall costs for your business. We then take a proactive approach to educating your employees and other members of the plan on how to be wise consumers of health care. For example, through claims analysis, we can often redirect members to a lower-cost, higher-quality care setting than the one they are currently using. This is a win-win for them and for your organization because the patient receives an enhanced quality of life and the plan saves money as a result.

Start Self-Funding Today

Our goal at General Insurance Services is to understand each client’s individual business, your needs, your challenges, and how we can deploy cost-containment strategies to help you meet your long-term goals. As an advisor, my role is to help you minimize your overall health care spending while enhancing your benefit offerings for plan members. Ideally, that leads to helping you maximize business growth by reinvesting those saved dollars back into your business.

If you do not already have a self-funded plan in place, I invite you to book an appointment with me to start designing your plan today. If you are already a self-funded employer, I would love to sit down with you to review your plan. You can connect with us or reach out to me by email at candace@genins.com or by phone at 219-850-1102. I look forward to hearing from you!