Dive Brief:

• Managing healthcare costs has been an HR challenge for decades, as offering valued, robust benefits and keeping costs in check represents a precarious balancing act, according to Employee Benefits Advisor. 
• One emerging cost saving move – the self-funding of healthcare plans, once the domain of large employers – is now available to small and mid-size companies.
• If HR and senior executives decide to take the self-funding plunge, the typical logic is to bundle services such as claims and plan administration through a single, integrated vendor. Yet one expert, whose company helps small and mid-sized employers self-fund healthcare benefits, calls that strategy a "myth."

Dive Insight:

Arthur Jonokuchi, founding partner and CEO of AdminaHealth LLC, writes that with single vendor benefits bundling, employers may save on administration, but added savings from things like "competitive rates, flexibility and transparency" may slip through the cracks.

When an employer bundles healthcare – components such as stop-loss, medical, prescription, dental, vision, wellness, and other voluntary benefits – costs can vary greatly and employers often end up "paying the price."

Without seeing individual fees for those components, he writes, price negotiating and shopping is not an option. With unbundling, the resulting fee transparency allows HR and their brokers to shop around for vendors that are the best fit based on critical factors such as location, company size and overall employee profile.

Finally, Jonokuchi says the growth of data analytics today means brokers can help HR and employers, their clients, fine-tune unbundled plans to get the needed services while keeping costs down.