QUESTION
Dear HR Community Subscribers,
We are wondering if we should continue to provide insurance for hospitalisation for our employees in future because:
1. Our local employees usually pay their hospital bills using Medisave and Medishied and have some form of government subsidies as well.
2. Those employees on work passes, for whom such insurance is mandatory, are causing our premiums to go up due to frequent claims.
Please advise how you reduce premiums for employees and whether you give your local employees a lump sum to purchase their own insurance.
We are a fintech company.
Thank you for your replies.
Hannah
HR Poll: Do you give your local employees a lump sum to purchase their own insurance?
Yes: 14.81%
No: 85.19%
REPLIES & COMMENTS
We provide Group Hospitalisation & Surgical (GHS) insurance. Employees will then have the option to choose to utilise the GHS or their personal insurance which is normally higher in coverage or Medishield. - Veronica
We have a co-payment component which is quite significant. - Chua
Medical claims are always the headache of the company. Below ideas for your consideration: 1. Promote a healthy diet, exercise etc. With some health talk and consultations. May consider weekly walking competition, for example, top 3 longest walking steps with awards etc. Or invite nutritionists to give health talk, like say why black coffee is more healthy etc. Or consider NO MC awards. As for insurance may consider panel clinics like MHC mobile app which staff no need to pay and claim back for panel clinics reduce administrative works etc. - Yang
Capping your insurance coverage, eg only 4-bedded in restructured hospital, panel GP referral required. - KSK
GHS is typically provided even for small SMEs. - Erin
You can consider co-payment - Joanne
My advice is to give them a lump to purchase insurance on their own because most of them would have purchased some form of insurance policy on their own in the past. - Florence
Dear Hannah
If the company has been providing GH&S, then this is part of the staff’s benefit and should not be removed suddenly. Medisave is the staff’s own money and Medishield is their own insurance policy with premium paid using their own money unless the company had been paying for them. These 2 modes should not be viewed as an excuse to remove GH&S.
There will always be 2 groups – work pass and non-work pass. Not much can be done to the former but you may want to consider the following for the latter:
1) giving a reasonable yearly lump sum for staff to purchase their own medical policy – regardless of whether staff use it for this purpose or not
2) having a medical (and dental, if so) claim limit for both in- and out-patient claims
3) crediting a yearly lump sum to staff’s Medisave account
4) co-payment
Do also bear in mind tax implications for employee/employer. Hope this helps
YWH
HRSINGAPORE | HR Community Message | Group hospital insurance
