Multinational employers considering adding GLP-1 coverage to their employee benefits strategy face three difficult challenges:
How to control costs
How to balance shifting claims costs against potential long-term savings
And how to build a GLP-1 strategy that not only boosts workforce health, but sustains it.
These questions – and more – are addressed in our latest whitepaper, ‘How can employers build an effective GLP-1 employee benefits strategy? Insights from MAXIS data’.
The paper’s author, Dr Leena Johns, Chief Health and Wellness Officer at MAXIS GBN, sat down with Richard Cutcher to discuss how multinational employers can use captives to manage the risk of adding GLP-1 coverage to their employee benefits (EB) programme.
The first step is to look beyond the weight-loss drug headlines and recognise GLP-1s’ potential in addressing the biggest health burden multinational employees and their employers are facing today, Dr Leena tells Richard.
“For me, the case for offering GLP-1s to employee populations has never been about weight loss alone: it’s about chronic disease.”
The data uncovered in our whitepaper shows:
38% of claimants are living with at least one chronic condition
Chronic disease accounts for 58.4% per cent for all paid claims across the MAXIS portfolio
Despite more than one in four chronic disease claimants potentially being eligible for GLP-1 therapy based on underlying conditions, only 5% of that population is currently receiving treatment.
“Crucially, this isn’t an ageing workforce story,” Dr Leena adds. “We are seeing this in younger people. The average age at which chronic disease is diagnosed in our data is 42. These are people in their prime of their working lives.”
“I think we need to move beyond the GLP-1 conversation from simply asking ‘should employers pay for weight loss drugs’ and start asking a much bigger question: ‘what role could these therapies be playing in tackling the chronic disease burden that’s already sitting within our workforce?’”
Listen to the podcast via your usual podcast app to find out more about what our whitepaper has uncovered – and how multinationals can include EB captives in their GLP-1 strategy. Just search “Global Captive Podcast”.
If you want to read more of our data insights and learn more about how multinationals can build effective GLP-1 benefits strategies, you can download our whitepaper now.