by Jason Coon
Today, Catholic employers are looking for ways to reduce the cost of their health plans and improve Catholic Identity within their health plan experience, but is standardization preventing them from achieving both?
Four years ago, we began reviewing Catholic employer health plans to remedy the challenges that our members faced, specifically in these two areas. What we found is a need for greater attention to detail and stronger commitment to addressing our Catholic faith within the health plan experience. A “Faith-First” approach, if you will.
We submerged ourselves into the self-funded Catholic health plan experience – from the purchasing process to implementation; and from choosing benefits and plan language to the customer service experience – we found an opportunity to fix key missing components critical to Catholic employers.
Standardization and the Erosion of Catholic Identity
Standardization is the process of creating protocols to guide the creation of a good or service based on the consensus of all the relevant parties in the industry. Its goal is to ensure uniformity to certain practices within the industry.
Standardization in health plans is necessary to ensure safety, strong business processes, interoperability, regulatory compliance and to service the health needs of their covered membership.
But there are negative consequences of standardization, and it is here where we found the need to focus our attention. Standardization offers a cookie cutter, one size fits all approach to health plans leading to a very basic experience that doesn’t know how to address faith-based benefits and services. These are often treated as outliers.
Standardization does not like outliers. In fact, standardization handles outliers in one of two ways:
- Elimination
- Accommodation
Here is where Catholic employer health plans suffer loss of their identity and the creativity to offer so much more than mere accommodations typically reserved for abortion, infertility, and contraception coverage.
These mere accommodations limit our faith and prevent a Catholic health plan experience from allowing its participants to live authentically and wholistically – physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual – which are inseparable.
Areas of Business Contributing to Erosion
As we explored the different processes involved with the buying, implementation process, and service processes, we looked for the elements we felt could be improved upon by those involved in these areas of business.
These are our observations:
The big purchase: The health plan purchasing process has been standardized by insurers, consultants, and employers for decades and typically it involves a Request For Proposal (RFP) process.
The RFP process is filled with data requests, Q&A Sessions, product and offering information, and data analysis. All is required to fairly identify what health plan option is the best fit for the employer.
The Problem: When it comes to Catholic employers, the Catholic faith and how it fits into these offerings is never evaluated with a higher priority across each option. It has no weight or baring in the consultant analysis or comparison processes. Typically, consultants leave that to the Catholic employer and instead show the Catholic employer the best financial and/or product option…which falls within their wheelhouse of expertise.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing. Money and savings is necessary for the Church as we look to be good stewards of our finances while supporting the missions of the church.
But, in today’s political, cultural, and legal climate Catholic employers must evaluate the risks associated in standard health plan options that include potential hazards to our beliefs and Catholic Identity. Not doing so, exposes them to costly procedures, attacks in today’s political climate, and becoming a victim of cultural shift.
No longer can they just shop on price alone. They must look for options that understand and safeguard their identity or demand improvement from the existing options. They should demand options that best support our Catholic faith and innovate towards a bold Catholic experience focused on eliminating risk from within the plan.
Implementing the new solution. Implementation processes for employers can be very daunting work. Human Resource teams are often very overwhelmed with these processes as they get bogged down in the plan detail and specifics. Often, immediate benefit decisions are requested and necessary to keep the implementation moving toward completion.
The Problem: During the implementation process, the employer representatives are required to be thoroughly attentive and are frequently asked of whether they would like to keep their current benefits or switch to the insurance standard. Catholic employers should be keenly aware of what these potential changes mean when it comes to their faith. Any change here could effectively erode the Catholic identity of their plan.
A recent example is of a church plan that excluded abortion. The insurance implementation specialist asked if the group would like to change to their stand of: “Elective abortion is excluded, except when mom’s life is in danger.”
When asked what this truly means to the insurance company, it was determined to cover therapeutic abortion. This does not align with Catholic teaching or beliefs thus exposing risk and reducing Catholic identity.
Plan Language. As my previous example of abortion proves, insurance company plan language does not always align with Catholic teaching. This requires added focus from Catholic employers to ensure the language does not conflict with the teachings of the church and our Catholic faith.
The Problem: Insurance language in health plans is frequently updated and changed. This continuous change is often communicated to employer groups who may overlook the significance of the changes. It’s important that Catholic employers have or seek out a process that can review health plan language consistently to ensure any conflicts are addressed immediately.
Government Intrusion. It is important to understand that increases in government mandates and insurance regulation continue to drive much of what goes into health and benefit offerings and language. Understanding this is important when discussing standardization and insurance companies. Standardization helps them to ensure they are eliminating their own risks.
The Problem: This standardization trickles into Catholic health plans as it is cross applied from employer to employer. Therefore, it is so important that Catholic employers have a process of continued monitoring and audit of their plan language.
Consumer Experience. The mere accommodation of faith-based benefits often leaves a Catholic health plan with not covering the services that conflict with our Catholic faith. But want about all the other goodness that is out there in the field of health and benefits that is supportive of a health, Catholic lifestyle?
The Problem: Accommodation of our faith in benefits has diminished innovation and evolution of a what a true Catholic health plan experience should look like. Catholic health plans should cover Natural Family Planning, Marriage Counseling, Naprotechnology services, and much more. Catholic health plan should steer to Catholic providers of service and guide to independent Catholic solutions in women’s health, children’s health, fitness, and mental health. That’s the experience that employees and their families need to support their lifestyle.
For 5 ways Catholic employers can immediately address the issues of Standardization, email Jason Coon at jasoncoon@catholicbenefitsassociation.org.
The Catholic Benefits Association is all about creating a new Catholic standard for employer health plans. Our goal is for individuals and families to experience what true Catholic healthcare feels like.
We are working hard for your freedom and to build a Catholic health experience that allows you and your family to
Live Well, Live Health, and Live Catholic!