What has been the norm in dealing with employers’ rising health care costs?
Over the past five to seven years, employers have reacted to rising health care costs by increasing their employees’ share of the bill (either through higher payroll deductions or higher co-pays and deductibles). Although shifting the cost burden to employees is the easiest short-term fix for employers, it is a poor long-term strategy for cost containment. What about using technology to help? Technology is everywhere you look these days, and the tendency in this modern age is to assume that a high-tech answer is always the best. Technology has certainly provided some amazing advances in medicine that have improved the quality of life for many people. Data mining and predictive modeling of medical information have also enabled health plans to identify and engage employees who are at high risk. But in our efforts to find some magic treatment or piece of information that will lower our health care costs, we have lost sight of one simple truth. What is that truth? It may not be glamorous o
