iPMI Magazine interview with our CEO Reg Allatt
CEO Reg Allatt was interviewed by iPMI Magazine. iPMI is an internet-based news service for worldwide insurance and assistance professionals and specializes in insurance and healthcare policy, regulatory, and legislative developments. Thousands of decision makers in over 120 countries read iPMI Magazine for news regarding international private medical insurance.
An excerpt from the interview is below.
Global Excel has been managing health care cases, claims and costs for more than 20 years. How has the business changed in that time?
In one sense it’s evolved but in another sense it’s stayed very much the same.
There is no question that healthcare costs remain a very significant concern for our clients. There was a time when the USA was constantly flagged for having the most expensive healthcare costs in the world. It’s still the most costly healthcare system in general, but relative price increases have actually slowed to their lowest point in years. Unfortunately the issue is that even a modest inflation rate in the USA translates into pretty significant hard dollar increases just because the prices are so high to begin with.
Internationally we’re seeing much higher relative increases in costs in other locations around the world. Today we’re noticing the same double-digit increases in certain areas which we saw in the USA in the early 2000s. To a certain extent this may be caused by certain providers looking to the U.S. as their benchmark for pricing but there’s no question that there is no ‘downward’ trend out there.
Certainly we’ve seen an evolution in the primary cost drivers. In the USA pharmaceutical costs, provider pricing practices, over-utilization, healthcare technology, M&A activity, etc. are all fuelling rising costs. It’s also a well-known fact that the USA is primarily a ‘fee-for-service’ system when the more a provider does, the more they get. However in the USA we can say that domestic patients (and their insurers) face the exact same issues as international patients (and their insurers) and it’s expensive for everyone. The system is uniformly bad in this regard. The big difference in the USA is the strategies international insurers use to manage their costs versus those used by domestic payers.
To read the full interview please visit: https://ipmimagazine.com/medical-health-insurance/en/insurance-industry-executive-interviews/item/5260-ipmi-magazine-speaks-with-reg-allatt-ceo-global-excel-management-inc
