Consumer-driven health plans — high-deductible health plans often paired with health savings accounts or health reimbursement accounts — are not achieving long-term savings greater than what would be reached by raising the deductible on traditional PPOs, according to the 2012 UBA Health Plan Survey, billed as the largest independent benchmarking survey in the industry. Although nearly 60% of the 11,711 employers surveyed say they plan to offer a CDHP in the next five years, despite some regional variances, PPOs remain the dominant plan type with 61.7% of U.S. employee enrollment and currently return a lower average cost per employee than CDHPs at nearly every deductible range.
The greatest savings of a PPO over a CDHP was achieved with a deductible of $2,000-$2,999, where PPO cost per employee was $7,811 and CDHP was $8,859, a savings of $1,000 per employee. In a small business with 50 employees, that is a savings of $50,000 annually, or more than $4,000 per month.
