Provider News & Updates
What Continued Hospital Consolidation Means for Employers
Hospital consolidation – when two or more providers merge – has become a growing concern among employers and other health care purchasers, and its presence looms large after facing the fallout of COVID-19. However, hospital consolidation didn’t arrive with the...
Reference-Based Contracting by The Alliance®: Benchmarking Prices to Lower Health Care Costs for Employers
As Americans, we generally utilize health care services at the same frequency and intensity as other developed countries, yet we continually pay more. A lot more. My friend and colleague, Cheryl DeMars, President and CEO of The Alliance, has been quoted publicly quite...
What is Self-Funding and How Can it Benefit My Business?
Self-funding (what’s known as self-insured insurance) is a health plan in which an employer is paying for their employees’ health care claims. In a self-funded plan, employers set aside money into a “fund” or trust that’s earmarked to pay their employees’ health care...
The Future of Health Care – and $3.4 Trillion in Future Medical Spend – Rests with Millennials
Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) make up nearly a quarter of the entire US population. It’s not surprising then that they are worth an estimated $3.4 trillion in future health care spending. But their participation in the current health care marketplace...
Event Recap: The Alliance 2021 Spring Symposium
This is a blog recap of our virtual event, The Alliance 2021 Spring Symposium, held on May 6. Click here to view the recording and for more Employer Resources. Cheryl DeMars, CEO of The Alliance, kicked off the event by illustrating how the rate of medical inflation...
Employee Behavioral Mental Health Resources: Event Recap
This is a blog recap of a virtual event held on April 26. Click here to view the full webinar recording. Click here to skip to the Employer Resources section. To begin the webinar, Kyle Monroe, Vice President of Network Development & Provider...
Emerging Health Care Price Transparency Trends for Employers
Price transparency is a hot topic in health policy right now. For good reason; employers and their employees fork over a large share of their incomes to health care every year, yet most have trouble planning for those expenses because of complex, often obscure pricing...
New Employee Benefits Trends in 2021 Shaped by COVID-19
Most employers have recognized the strain that the pandemic has placed on their employees and renewed their health benefits plans without significant changes to cost-sharing and network plan design. Efforts to improve delivery systems and networks to improve outcomes,...
High-Cost Claims and Stop-Loss Insurance: How Self-Funded Employers Can Mitigate Significant Losses
If you have a self-funded health plan, stop-loss insurance (also known as reinsurance) can help protect your organization from high-cost claims – unpredictable claims that are considered catastrophic to the plan. Certain forms of cancer, premature birth, and kidney...
COVID-19 Vaccination Management For Employers: Webinar Recap
The Alliance and Business Health Care Group (BHCG) hosted a webinar with several content experts to discuss employee communication strategies, policy and procedures, and other employer considerations regarding COVID-19 vaccination. This is a recap of the virtual...