A new Centivo survey of workers with employer-sponsored coverage revealed this trend.
The results of a recent Centivo survey of employees with an employer-sponsored health insurance plan showed that those workers would be willing to take less coverage to save money.
The research aimed to find out how willing workers are to alter their coverage if it improved affordability.
What the survey found was that 73 percent of the survey respondents would be willing to modify the core features of their health insurance plan if it meant that they would improve the affordability of their healthcare. Those respondents said that they would be willing to accept the “tradeoffs” to their coverage if they would gain a savings of 10 to 30 percent when compared to the current amount they are paying.
The results were published in the Centivo Healthcare and Financial Sacrifices Survey, 2021. It was conducted in August 2021 and involved the participation of 805 adults in the United States between the ages of 18 years old and 64 years old, each of whom had employer-sponsored private insurance.
This may prove to be helpful insight into employee opinions regarding their health insurance plan.
“Human Resources leaders often believe that their employees will never accept health plan modifications that in any way limit or guide healthcare choices, even if these changes could be highly advantageous from a cost perspective,” said Centivo chief product officer Alan Cohen. “The good news is that our survey results prove this conventional wisdom amongst employers is actually a myth that for far too long has served as a barrier to dramatic affordability improvements.”
The tradeoffs that the respondents were most likely to find acceptable included some of the core features to their plans. For instance, 50 percent of the respondents said that they would be willing to accept referrals for specialists as a requirement in order to save money. Almost the same percentage – 47 percent – said that they would find it acceptable to have to select their primary care physician from a set list in order to save money. Interestingly, 30 percent said that they would be willing to switch from their current primary care physician to one on a list, and another 28 percent said that they would be willing stop seeing a specialist from whom they were currently receiving care.
“The healthcare affordability crisis facing US workers is well documented within the business community and society at large,” said Cohen in a statement about the health insurance plan survey. “To truly help reverse this trend, however, employers and the advisors who serve them should feel empowered to make health plan changes that historically were viewed as highly disruptive. Their employees are in fact ready, willing and able to embrace significant health plan sacrifices for meaningful financial savings.”
