It’s That Time of Year: Use or Lose Consumer Health Benefits
Egg nog is showing up on grocery shelves, and holiday songs can be heard on the radio. So it must be time for all of us to assess the state of our health benefits.
At least thats what I argue in my Healthy Consumer column today. The point is that most health plans these days include design features - deductibles, first-dollar coverage on yearly preventive checkups, flexible-spending accounts - that are set on a 12-month cycle. So people who ignore the calendar may waste free benefits or pay more for surgeries or other care.
One interesting contrast came up during the reporting of the column. Cigna recently sampled 10 big national employers and found that only about half of the workers on average took advantage of the free preventive benefits.
But in the case of other use-it-or-lose-it health dollars, their own money set aside in a flexible-spending account, employees are apparently a lot more conscientious. Mercer says they failed to spend, and thus forfeited, just 2% of those funds, according to 2008 data.
So whats the difference? Its not clear. But here are a few possibilities. For one thing, the FSAs involve the workers own money, withheld from their paychecks by their […]
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