Healthcare Plan Design and Cost Containment Strategies

DESCRIPTION:

Inflating costs means that many current health care benefit plans are no longer sustainable. This session will enable you to build a business case for plan design change that allows for responsible and sustainable cost containment and that is practical to implement and easy to communicate. Help your organization achieve its financial goals while ensuring that benefits are not eroded for your plan members.

This issue is especially pressing since the financial pressures of providing health care benefits will only increase for Canadian employers as the workforce continues to age, as specialty drugs begin to outnumber traditional therapies with respect to new drug approvals, as public-to-private cost downloading continues unchecked and as plan members are diagnosed earlier with chronic diseases.

For HR professionals and their colleagues in finance and senior management, solutions that have a significant cost to implement and minimal impact are unacceptable. Using your own plan's drug claims and disability data, you can quantify the weaknesses in your existing plan design, understand existing and emerging population health pressures and begin to build a business case for plan design change that meets the following goals:

• Allows for responsible and sustainable cost containment moving forward, without adversely impacting the health of plan members
• Is practical to implement and easy to communicate to members
• Allows for the ROI to be calculated and communicated to internal stakeholders to ensure ongoing management support
  

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

• See why current plan designs are unsustainable and what emerging trends will impact every Canadian plan sponsor moving forward
• Examine the data sets that are available to facilitate the building of a business case that will achieve the goal of determining what design changes are most appropriate and what impact they will have
• Find out how practical, meaningful solutions to cost inflation can take place without impacting the value of the benefit to the plan member
• Discuss why the "accountability dilemma" present in the health care system negatively impacts current plan designs and hear what can be done to address this problem
• Identify the components of the business case and how they  can be measured using unique plan-specific data
• Learn what lessons the international experience has taught
  

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Mike Sullivan is a licensed pharmacist with a finance background. He co-founded Cubic Health Inc. in 2003. This independent, privately held drug plan management company works with Canadian employers to optimize health care benefits through the use of client-specific drug plan and disability data. An experienced keynote presenter, Sullivan has addressed groups ranging in size from 10 to 1500 participants across North America and internationally. He has spoken on topics related to managing drug plans and containing costs, building business cases to support plan design change, the drug pipeline in North America, measuring the return-on-investment of health and wellness initiatives, due diligence and corporate governance, what can be done to address the downloading of costs from the public to the private sector, the impact of legislative changes on the employer and how companies can use their own data to manage their plans. He is a member of the Benefits Canada Online Expert Panel and a regular contributor to industry publications in the pension and benefits, medical, pharmacy, legal and finance industries.