Employees bore the full impact of the extent to which medical inflation has exceeded salary inflation over the past 10 years, while companies have kept their contributions towards health care costs largely constant.
This is one of the findings of the Old Mutual 2003 health care survey released on Thursday.
Old Mutual Health Care MD Sizwe Mncwango said at the launch of the survey that in the inaugural survey in 1994, 80% of employers interviewed planned to make significant benefit changes to their medical scheme in an attempt to bring down costs.
What the past decade has shown is that instead of reducing costs, large portions of medical expenses have simply being shifted to employees. The capping of company contributions has become a preferred means of controlling company health care costs, with a growing number of employers including their total health care subsidy in the cash package of employees.
Mncwango said almost 60% of recently surveyed employers now believe that medical schemes in their current firm will not be able to provide sustainable health care solutions into the future.
The survey also found that employers and medical schemes have taken significant steps to offer benefits to HIV-positive employees, including making substantial subsidies available towards the funding of anti-retroviral treatment.
However, the full benefit of these interventions is yet to be realised because HIV-positive employees do not voluntarily come forward to participate. Old Mutual Health Care executive Adrian Baskir said “the impact of Aids on health-care funding is the second most important strategic issue in the survey which reveals an encouraging trend in terms of HIV Aids strategy development that features as the key action to address the impact of the pandemic.”
Some 68% of employers have developed a strategy and a further 14% plan to undertake this development, the survey found.
Another finding of the survey is that there is a growing belief among employers that a focus on preventative health in the workplace can help cut the costs of curative care.
Risk manager at Old Mutual Health Care Lydia Footman said employee wellness programmes were particularly prevalent among larger companies with more than 5 000 employees, with the majority surveyed paying the total cost towards the provision of such a programme. – I-Net Bridge