How employers save money by paying employees to shop for healthcare

Providing healthcare benefits to workers is getting more expensive for employers, a situation that has them scrambling for solutions. One approach has shown promise: Give them money to shop around for healthcare services. According to a new RAND Corp. study published in Health Affairs, paying employees between $25 and $500 for using a transparency tool, and encouraging them to select a lower-cost provider for certain elective healthcare services, can result in modest savings of about 2.1 percent over the course of a year. That's not a ton of money, but it's something, and with the cost of providing benefits on the rise, employers are starting to consider it as an effective cost mitigation strategy.