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A group of regional companies has formed a new nonprofit aimed at giving employers a voice to effect positive change in health care.
The group first started meeting in 2022. It soon received a grant from the National Alliance for Healthcare Purchasers to address employers’ needs for more affordable and accessible health care. In January 2024, the Greater Cincinnati Employers Group on Health (GCEGH) was formerly incorporated. Its goal is to improve the quality, cost and access to health care through advocacy, education and collaboration with providers and payers.
Jeff Walton has been the human resources director at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden for the past 20 years. He also runs his own consulting company. He was asked to join the group early on and now acts as its president.
“For me, it’s been this wonderful collaboration with like-minded folk,” Walton told me. “We’re educating ourselves, learning from each other and creating continuous collaborations with these key organizations in our region to learn how they do what they do.”
The mission of GCEGH is to serve as the voice of the customer for health systems and carriers.
According to Karen Mueller, a member of the group and the executive vice president of Hub Horan, benefits are any organization’s second-highest expense, besides payroll. And, the biggest benefit expense is health care. She said that over recent years, the ongoing trend is that health care expenses are accelerating at a higher rate than employee pay increases.
Walton said that in his experience, health care expenses were down during the pandemic, but now companies are seeing a rebound in costs from everyone going back and getting all the services that were put on hold during Covid.
“Employers are constantly having to try to mitigate those expenses,” Mueller said.
It’s a process that can often feel like a constant tug of war from the employer standpoint. In order to continue to recruit top talent, organizations not only have to be competitive in salary, but they also have to be competitive in benefits.
“Many employers are forced to pass on the rising cost of health care to their employees based on how the plans are either structured in higher deductibles or the cost of the premiums that come out of your paycheck,” Walton said. "That’s the biggest issue that my (chief financial officer) and I discussed each year when it comes to the renewal process. 'How is this going to impact our people?'"
If an organization wants to retain top talent, it isn’t sustainable for the company to continuously pass along the burden to its employees. It is also not sustainable for the employer to continue to eat that cost.
“We as employers want to work together to find solutions to improve the quality of health care and reduce the overall cost,” Eric Neuville, founder and CEO of Front Edge Consulting, told me.
He also is an early member who helped kick off GCEGH.
“Employers are very disaggregated in their communications with health system providers and payers. The systems and the providers have a lot of conversations around contracting, but employers are all independent,” Neuville said. “So, they haven't ever come together in the Cincinnati marketplace.”
These types of collaborations exist across the nation, but according to the group, employers in the region have not been represented in these national conversations.
“We brought them together to talk about the major challenges,” Neuville said. “We want to provide a forum for positive change.”
GCEGH contributors include P&G, Belcan, USI
So far, the nonprofit’s contributors include Advics, Belcan, the Cincinnati Zoo, USI Insurance, Hub, Reladyne, the City of Cincinnati, Procter & Gamble and McGohan Brabender.
Walton said that since joining and having these conversations with his peers, he has insight into more educated questions to ask the major carriers in the market as an employer.
The group has found that the biggest topics of conversation have been around the value of health care versus the volume of services, the integration of those services, which includes behavioral health, and transparency of the cost and that quality.
The group has already met with the major health systems to try to understand how they can all come together to figure out solutions.
“We’ve had some very open and transparent conversations with their executive teams,” Walton said. “The CEOs of these major hospitals here in the region have been in our room, and to me, that can only be a good thing.”
The focus initially was getting major employers involved in the group because their voices set the pace and the tone for things that can be scaled down to smaller employers.
That being said, everyone is welcome at the table. The group is currently seeking more contributors to join in the conversations.
“The contribution that they're making is their experience,” Mueller said. “It's really just the group coming together … there's no financial contribution, it's more intellectual property … sharing with the group in order for us to be able to influence change."
The group meets once every other week from around 7:30-9:30 a.m.
The group has recognized the barrier between an employer’s perspective and an employee’s perspective on this issue. Health care in America is expensive regardless. The goal, according to its members, is to improve access to quality health care for people working in the region.
“From an employee perspective, I would love to see my employer is involved in trying to solve this problem,” Mueller said.