Private health insurers know that someday the inevitable will happen—a significant number of people will refuse or be unable to pay the high health insurance premiums the industry has shamelessly extracted for decades. Insurers also know that all of their “cost-saving” efforts over the years were simply stalling tactics, temporary appeasements to employers (payers) to make them feel like they had some control over their multi-million dollar health plans. Insurers were so confident in their relationships with employers that they even took the name “payers” for themselves. However, lately, large employers have questioned their partnerships with insurers and are taking steps to improve the health care experience for their employees and decrease their health plan budgets. But get this; they’re keeping their private health insurance plans.

Large Employers Are Tinkering With Their Health Plans And Calling It Innovation

If you read about health care even occasionally, you know about the new company, Haven. A venture created by the heads of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase. Large companies that got together to create a health insurance company with the goal of lowering health insurance and health care costs for their employees. The health insurance status quo said, have at it. Private health insurers know better than most what’s required to make health care more affordable—medical care price controls and health care trade-offs. Insurers have perfected the art of managing health care trade-offs—most benefit plan documents contain pages of excluded health care benefits. And since employers aren’t talking about price controls, with the exception of reference based pricing, which is technically a form of price controls but with numbers that are easy to manipulate, insurers aren’t that pressed about this new wave of employer health care “innovation.”


Still, we don’t know what “innovations” to expect from Haven, but based on what I’ve read so far, it involves technology. And Haven’s not the first group of large, wealthy employers exploring how technology can help control health care costs. According to a very informative article in Benefits News, before Haven, there was The Employer Health Innovation Roundtable (EHIR), “a grassroots group made up of nearly 60 of the country’s biggest employers that represent nearly 8 million employees.” This group includes mega companies such as Apple, Target, and Google. Basically, representatives from EHIR watch presentations from health care tech start-ups and decide if they want to pilot the “benefit” at one of their companies and report back its findings to the large group via case study or some other format. Continue Reading...

Tags: health care innovation, health care , health care technology, Haven, EHIR