Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Role HRAs Play in Determining Health Insurance Policies

By Ethan Kalvin

A lot of larger corporations are researching ways to cut back on their health insurance expenditures. With the costs of health insurance rising so quickly, companies are always on the look out for innovative ways to reduce their own incurrence of health care costs whilst continuing acceptable benefits for their workers and themselves.

There are many ways for companies to cut insurance costs, but one new and very popular way is by offering HRAs to their employees. HRA stands for health risk assessment, and basically the employee allows the company to check their current health and provide ways that they could become healthier in the future.

Different companies do HRAs differently. Some companies offer their employees a questionnaire and then advise them based on that. Some companies do height, weight, body mass index and basic blood tests for cholesterol and blood sugar. Either way, they try to point out areas that their employees need to work on and how they can go about living a healthier lifestyle.

Now if you have never been at a company who does HRA screenings, then you probably don't know why people would want to have these done. Well, usually the company provides some sort of monetary assessment. They either tack on a few dollars to each paycheck, or deduct sums of about $10 per week off the employees' health insurance costs, using the monetary rewards to motivate people to come in and get checked out.

HRA screenings can serve a great purpose to the big companies and the employees working for them. Working together to keep health insurance costs down is a worthwhile project and who knows maybe you an learn a little bit more about getting healthier and staying healthy. Now that really benefits everyone.

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