According to a new survey from the Leapfrog Group, employers largely "remain disappointed" with their health plans, giving them an average grade of "C" across several different dimensions.

Ready-to-use slides: Market outlook for health plans

How employers feel about their health plans

Last summer, Leapfrog surveyed 114 company executives about how well their health plans achieved quality, safety, and value. Of the participants, 49% were HR directors or managers, 14% were senior HR executives, and 11% were CEOs or CFOs.

Over 25% of participants said their companies had employees in at least 21 states, and roughly one-third of the organizations in the study covered a minimum of 10,000 employees under their health plan.

In an online survey, participants were asked to identify the health plan or plans they were contracted with and rate them on a scale of "A" through "F" on four key issues, including:

• Responsiveness to employer concerns
• Transparency in helping employers and employees choose the best provider
• Payment reform initiatives
• Value strategies

When asked about how their health plans performed on certain factors, most employers (59%) said employees were given easy access to usable data. Many employers also said their health plans care about the quality of care patients receive (57%), demonstrate a commitment to employee health (56%), and are working to reducing unnecessary healthcare costs (53%).

However, two areas that employers viewed less favorably were the sharing of quality and safety data (26%) and alternative payment model (APM) offerings (29%).

"We did see that employers perceive significant room for improvement across all categories," said Leapfrog president and CEO Leah Binder. "There were no outstanding results."

Previously, Leapfrog had administered the same survey to employers in 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, participants' responses saw significant changes in two areas.

Although participants were now more likely to agree that their health plans share quality and safety data, they were significantly less likely to say that they were satisfied with their health plans' APM offerings.

In addition, there was a slight decline in the overall score employers gave their health plans in 2022 compared to 2020. Based on the letter grades participants gave each issue, Leapfrog calculated a grade point average (GPA) for each plan on a 4.0 scale.

In 2022, health plans received an average GPA of 2.29, or a "C" grade. This score was a slight decline from the 2.57 GPA health plans received from employers in 2020.

"This is a somewhat depressing result if you're a health plan," Binder said. "I think health plans should be getting A's. Certainly I think all the health plans themselves would want to be getting A's. That's not what their clients are giving them."

How can health plans improve?

According to Leapfrog, "[e]mployers now bear more legal responsibility for assuring that benefits they provide are cost-effective and high quality, so the dissatisfaction in this report should be an urgent priority for health plans."

To determine what changes health plans could make going forward, Leapfrog analyzed responses from participants who gave the highest grades ("A" or "B") to their health plans to find which factors they valued most.

Overall, the most important factor for high-grading respondents was believing their health plan cared about the quality of care patients received. Other important factors include efforts to improve employees health, easy access to usable data, a commitment to reducing unnecessary costs, and quality information on providers.

Overall, "employers perceive significant room for improvement" when it comes to health plan's quality, cost, transparency, and more, Leapfrog writes. "Health plans should look for opportunities to partner with business groups on health and employers and other purchasers to better achieve these shared goals." (Plescia, MedCity News, 1/26; The Leapfrog Group Employer Health Plan Survey, accessed 1/27)