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Employers are feeling the “squeeze” in terms of managing costs between today’s economic headwinds and attracting talent in today’s challenging labor market.
We sat down with Dan Bernstein, a Mercer veteran, on the Paytient Podcast to discuss how employers and their benefit consultants can be thinking about navigating issues like rising inflation, supply chain constraints, burnout and turnover, and various other macroeconomic challenges.
Dan has more than three decades of experience in the health and benefits space. His perspective on the challenges employers are feeling at the moment is insightful to the broader struggle that’s been happening for years. Employers face this conflict between offering a generous, competitive, and compelling benefits package and the reality of its (rising) cost.
Here are some highlights from Dan during our conversation:
The Current Reality of the Market
"If we just take a step back and think about all the challenges we're facing today that we haven't faced before, it's a lot. We're still in the midst of or on the tail end of a major pandemic that we haven't seen before, the war in Ukraine certainly rages on with significant disruption, and in the supply chain, we have this inflationary environment. We're either in a recession, or we're in a recessionary environment, and yet, despite all of these things, we have an extremely tight labor market.’
“So that is a unique set of circumstances that we haven't seen ourselves in before, and it filters certainly down to the benefits arena, and employers are going to have to think more strategically and more thoughtfully about the universe of solutions that are available to them."
The Need for Thoughtful Benefit Solutions
"Regardless of where they are in the organization, people are facing inflation. They're facing their own economic issues, and on top of all of that, to have an employer say, 'yeah, once again, we're going to increase your deductibles, your co-pays, your coinsurance,' you know people are starting to feel very disengaged from their benefit programs, and that presents a real problem on the need for smart, thoughtful solutions."
A Key Metric to Follow
"The more satisfied employees are with a particular program, the more engagement you're going to get, the more utilization you're going to get, which is also a key metric that you want to follow and develop a strategy for determining what return on investment is going to look like and then follow up on those metrics."
"What is going to be the right solution given your demographics and what you know as an employer about what's driving your costs and results? What are the things of greatest concern to these different facets of your population? It's not easy to determine because there are a lot of solutions. Paytient is one of them, and it's a very compelling solution that has the promise of impacting a lot of employees.”
Listen to the full discussion via the podcast player below or by clicking this link. If you'd like to connect with Dan, you can reach him via LinkedIn or by emailing bernsteindan59@gmail.com.
