Group employee benefit captives: all grown up
From: Captive International, October 1, 2018
With the right resources, accountability and proactive management, group employee benefit captives can save employers money, reduce claim costs and bend the medical trend curve, says Wendy Dine of Strategic Risk Solutions.
While many will debate when the first group employee benefits captive (aka group medical stop loss captive) was formed, there is no disputing the exponential growth in the use of captives to allow small and mid-size employers to partially self-insure and share a layer of medical stop loss risk in a captive.
Although arrangements can vary from programme to programme there is certainly one commonality among the most successful structures: the use of cost containment strategies to mitigate high-cost claims, overutilisation or billing errors, not only in the captive layer, but also within each employer’s self-insured retention.