Are we ready for an end to employer-sponsored group health insurance?
Mike Markland, the CEO of an employee benefits consulting firm, certainly thinks so. In a recent viewpoint piece written for Employee Benefit News, he opined that employers that “want to attract talent in this new world will need to offer individual choice of health insurance the same way they now need to offer remote work.” He believes this so strongly, in fact, that the primary focus of his consulting involves showing employers how, exactly, to accomplish this; and in his opinion piece, he presents the idea as something cutting-edge and new.
While his presentation is good, experienced benefits professionals will easily recognize that this is far from a new idea. It has been tried before, more than once. It didn’t work then, and — unfortunately — it’s not going to work now. It’s going to be tried again in the future sometime, and it should be, because hopefully someday we will see an extinction of the dinosaur that is employer-sponsored group health. But we’re not to that point yet. Neither employers nor employees are ready.