Exploring Health Captives

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The idea behind joining a health insurance captive – a form of self-funding – is to pool risk across its participating companies to save significant amounts of money for each. But what happens when your company’s employees often represent the “good risk” holding up the “bad risk” within the pool?

That’s precisely what can occur when credit unions enroll in a traditional health plan or join a generic health insurance captive. In fact, most credit unions share risk with high-risk industries, such as construction, roofing, maintenance and even asbestos removal. While this may provide cost savings benefits for companies within those industries, it results in unnecessarily high expenditures for credit unions and exorbitant costs for their employees. With an average age younger than 40 and the number of annual medical claims nearly a quarter below other industries, credit unions’ risk level is among the best in the U.S. Don’t let that positive performance go to waste.