Engaging Employees in Health Care Benefit Design

Traditionally, benefit managers get together with an advisor or broker and a representative from a health insurance company to decide what to include in their employer-provided health care coverage. No employer can afford to pay for everything, so this small team debates the tradeoffs and decides what's best for the organization. 

I asked myself what it would look like if employees had input into these decisions, and I set out to design a process to facilitate employee input. I invited ASHA employees to participate in this process, and together, we redesigned one of the health insurance plans we offer to staff and dubbed it the ASHA signature plan. 

You can read about this journey in Health Affairs. If you're interested in learning more, I wrote a white paper with Len Nichols, professor of Health Economics at George Mason University (GMU), Lisabeth Buelt, and her colleagues at NPC. NPC provided funding for me to contract with GMU to analyze what insights we could draw from all the data we collected. I hope our work inspires other employers to involve their employees in decisions about their benefits.