At the 18th Annual MedBen University Municipality & Public Employer Roundtable on April 24, clients were shown how MedBen’s self-funding solutions are lowering medical and pharmacy spend while promoting healthier workplaces. Attendees were also introduced to benefit innovations that improve outcomes and keep costs as low as possible.
MedBen President & CEO Kurt Harden opened the event and provided an overview of MedBen Rx’s growing number of pharmacy solutions, including newer services like our benefit preservation and specialty pharmacy programs. He also broke down the economic impact of obesity trends and highlighted how an anti-inflammatory biosimilar is already projected to save MedBen Rx clients over $3 million in 2024.
Our special guests from Profero Team, Founder & CEO Marc Sweeney and Director of Precision Medicine Cynthia Yu, discussed how precision health management through genomic testing is poised to change the health care landscape. Sweeney and Yu spotlighted:
- Pharmacogenomics, which determines how an individual will respond to particular drugs, thereby minimizing trial-and-error, and;
- Nutrigenomics, which studies the interaction of nutrition and genes to help prevent and treat diseases.
“Because your genetic makeup doesn’t change, these tests offer lifelong benefits from as early as age two,” Yu observed.
MedBen Senior Vice President Caroline Fraker described mental health parity rules that are expected to be finalized in January 2025. The proposed rules will focus on new analyses to ensure that a health plan’s mental health and substance use disorder benefits are comparable with its medical and surgical benefits. (Read more about these rules here.)
MedBen Vice President of Sales & Marketing Brian Fargus analyzed five-year industry benchmarks. He noted that as with other MedBen blocks of business, net claim cost trend for municipalities and private employers from 2019 to 2023 was just 3.9 percent.
“We’ve seen that based on national norms during that period, cost trend fell between six and seven percent,” Fargus observed. “So for our clients to consistently stay below national trend is something we take great pride in.”
MedBen Regional Sales Director Brooke Hupp closed the roundtable with a look at alternative reimbursement strategies that put an end to pricing guesswork, including Fair Market Reimbursement (FMR) than in 2023 yielded a discount average of 71 percent. You can read more about how FMR maximizes savings and minimums noise in the MedBen Blog.
Thanks to Crum & Forster for sponsoring the Municipality & Public Employer Roundtable!