Why timing and affordability have become the missing pieces in everyday healthcare
For years, the healthcare conversation has focused on one issue: the rising cost of medical insurance.
But there is another problem that deserves just as much attention: people are struggling to access everyday healthcare when they need it.
Employers continue to face significant increases in the cost of providing medical benefits. With budgets already stretched, many have little choice but to pass a portion of those increases to employees through higher payroll deductions, higher deductibles and greater out-of-pocket costs.
Employees can have medical insurance and still struggle to afford healthcare.
For many families, medical insurance has increasingly become protection against major or catastrophic expenses. That’s important, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the everyday need to talk with a medical professional about an illness, get help with a mental health concern, refill a prescription or address a health issue before it becomes something bigger.
The Other Barrier: Time
Getting care can mean waiting days or weeks for an appointment, leaving work, driving to a clinic, sitting in a waiting room or spending hours at an urgent care center or an emergency room. For an employee balancing work and family responsibilities, that’s not convenient healthcare access. It’s friction, and it is expensive.
When care is expensive or difficult to access, people often delay it. A relatively simple health issue can become more disruptive to the individual, their family and their employer.
That’s the need employers should be thinking about: how do we give our people simple, timely and affordable access to everyday healthcare without adding another major expense?
A Different Front Door to Healthcare
Whole Person Virtual Care was designed specifically around giving people direct access to healthcare and mental healthcare, timely and affordably.
Whole Person is not insurance and doesn’t replace medical coverage. It supplements it by providing access to an independent virtual medical practice that has delivered more than 6 million patient encounters with a 96% resolution rate on the first encounter.
Members can connect with real providers within 30 minutes, from any device, with a $0 visit fee and no visit limits. It is a common-sense solution.
The virtual practice integrates Acute & Urgent Care (I need help now), Family Care, Mental Healthcare and Weight Management, with providers able to prescribe medications, authorize refills and order labs when medically appropriate. A subscription covers the employee, spouse and eligible dependents through age 26.
Because it isn’t insurance, employers can also make Whole Person available beyond the traditional benefits-eligible population, including full-time, part-time, seasonal and 1099 workers.
Make healthcare easier to access. Make it affordable to use.
Make it available when people need it.
For employers struggling with healthcare budgets, the answer doesn’t always have to be providing more insurance. It’s about a simple supplement that sits above any carrier and provides consistent access to a virtual medical practice.
For individuals who have medical coverage, and for those who do not, Whole Person gives you real access to care simply, timely and affordably.
Giving people better access to care is not complicated the way insurance companies and the status-quo establishment have made it.