How to Communicate the Benefits of High-Deductible Health Plans

Health care is a highly valued employee benefit, essential to supporting day-to-day health needs, as well as providing financial security. However, employers and plan sponsors find themselves challenged when having to develop communications about differing, high quality and affordable health care options to their diverse workforces.

Most organizations offer a mix of traditional health plans, such as preferred provider organizations (PPOs) and health maintenance organizations (HMOs), alongside high-deductible health plans (HDHPs), often called consumer-driven health plans (CDHPs). CDHPs are intended to encourage employees to be more involved in their health plan decisions. They typically work alongside a health savings account (HSA) or health reimbursement arrangement (HRA), which allows employees to save money for their current and future medical expenses.

While CDHPs have been offered since the early 2000s, they often confuse employees and their family members. The key to their success is avoiding common mistakes and making them as easy to understand as possible.

Simplify the Plan Design

Have you ever upgraded your phone and used a comparison tool to easily determine the difference between models and which one you can afford? Approach your plan designs the same way. Choosing a proper health care plan often feels Herculean and difficult to comprehend on its own. By comparing your plans with simple up-front elements (costs for premiums, deductibles, out-of-pocket maximums, etc.), easy-to-follow visual designs, and understandable language, it’ll be easier both on you and your employees in the long run. Remember, the more confident your employees feel when selecting their health care plan, the more they’ll use it!

Think Long Term

It can be easy to offer higher employer contribution rates for the HSA to help boost enrollment levels, but if that’s not sustainable, you may want to reconsider. Eliminating or lowering that contribution later on may feel like a penalty.

Wellness Programs Are Your Friends

When it comes to consumer-driven health care, enrollment is just as important as encouraging employees to make smart and affordable lifestyle decisions. To have a control over costs, you must combine the use of savvy health care with preventive care services. This means everyone should be encouraged or incentivized to participate in wellness programs, and those with chronic conditions should enroll in disease management programs. Introducing certain incentives, such as lower out-of-pocket costs for completing wellness activities, can motivate employees, but often wellness programs feel as if they operate outside of the health plan. By aligning HSA contributions with the overall health plan and wellness programs, employees can better understand how their benefits are connected and how to best utilize them.

Communication Is Key

Consider your rollout period and what exactly needs to be communicated before your annual enrollment period. Are you trying to steer people into a specific plan? Are there other enrollment goals? These are the questions you should be thinking of before starting your communications. Realize that, for the average person, change can be a scary thing. You should balance the amount of time your employees need to assess targeted information and consider the actions items with the length of time you can sustain their attention.

Begin communicating too early and employees can feel confused, stressed, or even disinterested right when they should begin to care about making a smart enrollment decision.
Begin communicating too late and the mountain of information delivered in such a short time span can overwhelm your employees, impacting their ability to feel confident in making informed health plan decisions. Let your employees have a grace period to digest this incoming change without causing too much anxiety, while also mitigating the stress that comes with sudden deadlines on your end.

The best way to avoid increased calls and growing frustration with your rollout structure is to use your time wisely. Think of your workforce and benefits strategy when contemplating your window of opportunity for communications. Remember to factor in individual needs and feedback so you have time to make changes to your communications strategy before annual enrollment begins.

Make It Easy for People

All employees want during annual enrollment is to make the smartest choice when selecting a health plan. You can minimize the legwork by helping demonstrate what the CDHP can provide and how it will affect them individually. Simplifying the way you display the plan design, as stated above, is a great start. Presenting information with a “What’s in it for me?” mentality or creating situational personas (i.e. new hire, mid-life, and pre-retiree) can provide employees with cost examples and explain how plans like the CDHP will support them based on their health care needs at different stages of life. Keep in mind that most employees will only get this one opportunity a year to make such an impactful decision with their benefits coverage. In the same vein as Goldilocks searching for the perfect bed to sleep in, you want your employees to figuratively “try out” the different plans you offer by considering which ones best fit their lifestyle and, thanks to your communication materials, settle on the one that is just right.

We’re proud to work with organizations that value their people. If you want to learn more, we’d love to talk.