For all companies with international health insurance plan, high medical inflation in Asia is a constant threat to stability of your corporate scheme: containing annual inflation is a must to maintain long term benefits. You will find below different actions that will help you reducing the premium of your health insurance group plan.
1/ Pay only for your staff needs
Know what your staff needs to be covered for and only pay for that. You can focus on basic coverage including inpatient and outpatient treatments. And you can consider removing or not including optional coverage such as dental, optical or maternity benefits.
2/ Full medical underwriting
In the case your staff has no chronic conditions that require regular medication or medical treatment, you can choose to be covered under Full Medical Underwriting (FMU) terms: it will will reduce your annual premium compared to a Medical History Disregarded (MHD) terms.
3/ Tailor different levels of cover for different members of the group
Instead of covering everyone with the same plan, you can decide to separate your staff into different sub-groups. For instance, the staff management can be covered with more comprehensive benefits. And the younger and healthier employees can be covered with less benefits or lower annual limits. This way, it will optimize coverage and reduce costs.
4/ Lower the level of benefits
If some benefits have a too high level of coverage, you can reduce the annual premium by lowering the level of benefits. For instance, if you have USD 4,000 coverage for alternative therapies in your current contract, but your staff only use at most USD 2,000. Then by reducing the benefits from USD 4,000 to USD 2,000, you can reduce annual premium without impacting much the coverage.
5/ Define your area of coverage
Premium increases with wider geographical area of coverage. You can decide to reduce the coverage area to a more local one in order to reduce the annual premium. In case you have subgroups, you can also tailor different area of coverage according to your subgroups needs.
6/ Add some co-payment
Instead of removing some benefits, you can also adjust them by adding some co-payment. That means, in case your employees wants to go for some specific medical treatment with co-payment, they will have to pay from themselves for the co-payment part and the rest will be covered by the insurance. By adding co-payment, you will reduce annual premium.
7/ Increase the annual deductible
Annual deductible is the part of medical expenses payable by your employees before the coverage kicks in. Adding annual deductible for in-patient or out-patient will reduce significantly the costs for insurer and lower annual premium.
8/ Decide to include or not high costs hospitals
In some countries like in China, the services of high costs hospitals can be very different from the local ones, by proposing some foreign doctors for instance. In that case, it may be important to keep them in the coverage of your group plan particularly for non-local employees. In some other countries, the standard of local hospital is quite high, so there might not be need to cover your employees for high costs hospitals. In that case, this will help your company to reduce the annual premium of your group international health insurance premium.
With these 8 tips, you will get the most value for money from your corporate health insurance scheme. Our consultants at Clema Risk Solutions in Hong Kong can help you to figure out how to reduce your group international health insurance premium. Please contact us at hello@clema-rs.com.hk
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