As a digital editor at Milliman, I crafted and edited content for their external-facing website, wrote email newsletters, product pages, service pages, social media content for Twitter and LinkedIn, and created audiograms, along with curating podcasts.
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Top five trends in supplemental benefits 2022
This blog post was originally published on Milliman’s LinkedIn.
By: Erin Berge
Strategy consultant Christin Kuretich has many years of experience working with supplemental benefits, or insurance products that can cover diverse needs. Here’s her take on the top five supplemental benefits products that we may see trending in 2022. For more on each of these trends, listen to the full podcast.
Adding mental health to critical illness products
Mental and behavioral health and wellness has become more of a priority within the past two years as we have adapted to living in a pandemic. We are seeing this shift also because of influential voices and the incoming working generation who are more comfortable speaking out on how mental health affects their daily lives. Employers are now moving from a traditional wellness perspective to broaden health benefits, covering mental and behavioral health.
“We can thank people like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka, just a couple names in the sports arena who have been really outspoken about how mental health has impacted their performance, making tough decisions like choosing to not participate in the specific Olympic events,” said Kuretich. “I think, thinking about that category of health in a new way is going to be something that really needs to impact employers and how they look at benefits.”
Caregiver type benefits within products
Since there is an estimated 53 million providing unpaid care for relatives or friends, companies are starting to provide caregiver support in the workplace. These services could apply to employees who are caring for a family member, neighbor, or a friend.
“Not only can caregiving be a huge strain financially, but going back to our discussion on mental health, you think about the cumulative effects of stress and burnout, those are just beginning to be understood right now as it relates to caregiving,” said Kuretich.
Fertility and family planning benefits
Carriers are starting to include fertility benefits in their products. Indemnity benefits, or a lump sum payout for either infertility or services related to family planning, are becoming more common. Kuretich says for those starting a family outside of the traditional way we look at it, there’s no real benefits or coverage. But this could make things easier for families if these benefits are included.
“To be able to have not only a financial cushion, but maybe access to new resources, it just kind of changes the conversation,” said Kuretich.
Pet insurance
We all read about the uptick in pet adoptions during the pandemic. As a result, we may see an increase in pet insurance benefits at the group level, offered through employers. The market is moving more toward offering pet insurance as a group-type product, which means limited underwriting or no underwriting.
“Pets are kind of human-adjacent, so to a lot of us, our fur-babies are our children. I don’t think it’s a surprise that number four on the list is pet insurance,” said Kuretich.
Product design disruption
According to Kuretich, currently supplemental benefits products are broken down by categories, e.g. accident, hospital, critical illness, and disability insurance. Instead of keeping them narrowly focused in each of those categories, there is a shift to focus design on diagnosis codes or ICD-10 codes. You can then compile a list of covered triggers that break apart the guardrails that we’ve typically seen in supplemental benefits.
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Erin Berge 