Auburndale Florida Health Insurance Update

An Orlando Florida based coalition grouped together many of the major employers in Florida during the early 1980's. The Florida Health Care Coalition has now expaned into many of the largest counties in Florida. This is an attempt to lower health insurance costs in Florida.

The coalition expanded to Polk County in 2000 and now represents large firms throughout Central and South Florida employing more than 2 million workers, according to Steve Henderson, director of risk management for the Polk County School Board and a member of the FHCC board of directors.

Other Polk organizations represented on the FHCC board are the Board of County Commissioners, Publix and the City of Lakeland. Watkins Motor Lines was an FHCC member until the firm was acquired by FedEx in 2006.

A Brief History

The FHCC was formed after Becky Cherney, now FHCC founder and CEO but then director of human resources for Tupperware, learned in 1983 that her company's health insurance costs would go up by 30 percent the following year.

"For what?" Cherney asked. "I knew what I was paying, but I sure didn't know what I was getting. I didn't know if we were getting the best doctors or the most effective pharmaceuticals or if the lives of our employees were improved.

"The first thing I learned is that everybody was to blame and nobody was in charge. You could get all the health care stakeholders in one room, point your finger anywhere and you'd be pointing at blame."

Health insurance companies did not perceive themselves as part of the health care system, Cherney said.

"They thought they were merely administrators," she said, indicating that the insurers saw their role simply to collect money from consumers, take their fee for service and pass on the balance to the providers. If the providers raised their prices, the insurance companies merely raised their rates.

After doing more research, Cherney said she "...realized that the issue was not cost, but quality." If she closely monitored quality, determining and then requiring the best management practice for any health issue, imposed the most efficient system for delivering care and, most importantly, plugged informed, conscientious consumers into the system, costs would go way down.

Keeping Costs Down

Although active membership in the coalition is limited to companies and institutions that employ 1,000 or more, even the smallest company can benefit from the coalition's efforts.

One FHCC service available to anyone is "eValu8," the coalition's tool for evaluating health insurance plans and wellness programs. The 30-page report can be downloaded from the group's Web site - www.flhcc.com - in PDF format.

The single most important thing any employer can do to control direct and indirect health-related costs, according to Cherney, is to encourage and empower employees to live healthy lifestyles and to assume responsibility for their own health.

Unhealthy lifestyles and employees' failure to monitor their own health and actively seek "wellness" account for most "unnecessary" health care costs.

An Ounce of Prevention

In mid-January, 12,000 employees plus retirees of the Polk County School Board were mailed invitations to take part in a half-day health fair in South Lakeland on March 8. Services include free screenings for cholesterol, glucose, vision, hearing, blood pressure and other health indicators.

Those services will cost the School Board. In the long run, however, they will save the Board - and therefore the taxpayers - significantly more money because diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other diseases are much easier and cheaper to treat and control when caught early.

Small and medium-sized companies may not be able to provide health and wellness fairs for their employees, but they might provide information about associations related to specific diseases and conditions, many of which offer free or low-cost screenings.

Proactive consumption, intervention and prevention represent "the million-dollar solution to the trillion-dollar (health care) problem," said the School Board's Henderson.

While Florida law prohibits companies from pooling their work forces to obtain better insurance rates, nothing prevents them from combining forces to share costs of health fairs and wellness programs.

And that's how the highest-quality health-care system becomes the least expensive.

"Well, we're working on it," Henderson said