Individuals aren’t the only people who are carefully monitoring healthcare costs. According to findings from the “State of Employee Benefits in the Workplace” survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 83 percent of organizations surveyed felt “very concerned” about keeping healthcare costs under control.
Many of the organizations have taken steps to curb healthcare costs using strategies like health and wellness education (45 percent of organizations), promoting a healthy work culture (41 percent) and encouraging employees to participate in health-related activities (43 percent).
For the 2014 plan year, SHRM reports that 24 percent of companies intend to have their employees pay an increased portion of healthcare costs and 21 percent of companies do not intend to make their employees cover more costs.
The rest of the organizations surveyed, 55 percent, were not decided about whether or not to increase the healthcare costs covered by employees.
According to the survey, 21 percent of companies that currently pay the same amount or more of health-related costs than their employees expect that their employees will end up paying most of the costs within three to five years.
The SHRM report goes on to cover what the survey results may mean for the human resources field.
“As health care costs continue to increase, HR professionals will have to determine modifications to their organization’s health benefit plan, and whether these changes will have any impact on their organization’s overall total rewards strategy,” the report states. “For instance, will trimming or eliminating health care benefits hinder an organization’s ability to attract and retain talent?”
When asked which activity has most successfully helped control healthcare costs, the top responses were offering health plans like HRAs that are consumer-directed (22 percent), increasing the share of health costs covered by employees (20 percent) and getting more employees to take part in health and wellness efforts (13 percent).
Organizations of all sizes took part in this survey, with 33 percent having 99 employees or under, 32 percent having 100 to 499 employees, 17 percent having 200 to 2,499 employees, 12 percent having 2,500 to 24,999 employees and six percent having 25,000 or more employees.
Majority of the companies surveyed were for-profit, privately owned organizations (51 percent). Twenty-four percent were nonprofit organizations, 12 percent were for-profit, publicly owned companies, 11 percent were government organizations and two percent were listed as “other.”
