O’Care By The Numbers

And that was the good news!

Here’s why:

This group of just under a dozen employees (plus various dependents) is pretty generic: $30 doc visit co-pays, a prescription card benefit, $2500 per person deductible (max $5,000 per family). The Maximum Out-of-Pocket (MOOP) is $3500 per person ($7,000 per family). The group’s renewal rate is about $7500 per month.

Or, they could choose to “upgrade” to a fully ACA-compliant plan for a … might want to sit down for this … 93% rate hike (to $12,000 per month). This included the privilege of upping the family MOOP from $7,000 to $8,500.

Yeah, I didn’t get it, either.

Still, we decided that it was worth shopping around to see if we could do better. At the outset, I warned my client that he shouldn’t get his hopes up too high, since all the plans we’d be looking at **have** to be ACA-compliant.

And I was not disappointed. To their credit, the quotes came in pretty quickly; I tried to pick out the plans that most closely resembled the current design:

Company A offered a $2,000/person deductible plan, co-pays and rx, with a $12,000 family MOOP for $12,700/month

Company M’s plan had a $5,000/person deductible, co-pays and rx, with 1 $12,700 family MOOP, for the bargain price of $12,300/month

Company I was the best “deal” of the lot; it’s plan featured a $2,000 deductible, co-pays and rx card, and a $12,700 family MOOP for only $10,400/month

Finally, Company U had a $3,000 deductible, co-pays and rx, with a $12,500 family MOOP for a bit over $11,000/month

So you can see why this employer, at least, was singularly unimpressed.

The big question is how much longer we can hold into his existing plan.

Time will tell.