It goes without saying that the pandemic has not been easy on anyone. Now, on top of the disruption and devastation in our personal and professional lives, recent difficulties brought about by the pandemic and other worldwide events have shaken up the economy as a whole. Inflation has once again reared its head and threatened consumers with skyrocketing prices across the board. In this article, we’ll explore how inflation is affecting the lives of your employees, the inflation impact on healthcare costs, and how HR teams can help.

Employee’s Inflation Experience

While you might be thinking of how inflation affects your ability to spend, not enough thought is given on how it might affect somebody’s ability to earn. As inflation starts rising beyond the standard target of any given economy, prices tend to go past their average levels, which in turn might mean that your employees won’t be able to afford the same lifestyle with their current salary. As inflation goes up, the buying power of every dollar earned goes down.

The US government has taken a few steps to address inflation in the market—increasing HSA contribution limits for the 2023 calendar year to encourage saving, and increasing interest rates to discourage spending/ borrowing.

While these actions can help bring inflation back down nationwide, they don’t hit very close to home in helping employees save on the inflation impacted costs in their day-to-day lives. Employees are still paying higher costs for gas, groceries, and other necessities.

We recently surveyed employees to better understand what aspects of their lives they’re feeling the most impact of inflation. The study uncovered the top 5 areas causing employees the most financial pain and stress.

Top 5 Financial Increases:

1. Groceries
2. Gas Prices
3. Utilities
4. Medical Care
5. Rent

Being a benefits-focused blog, we’d be remiss to not double click on the medical care aspect here. Let’s just break that down again: out of all of the inflated routine expenses plaguing Americans daily, medical care is coming in as the 4th most-felt cost increase.

Healthcare costs can come in many forms, typically, they stem from:

• Routine visits
• Managing chronic conditions
• Picking up prescriptions
• Emergency services
• Out-of-network care, and more.

These costs are typically steep, so during a period of record-high inflation, these necessary expenses are only getting more and more expensive. This is where a tool like Nayya comes in.

A comprehensive benefits experience platform can empower employees with guidance to make the healthcare and benefits decisions that will in turn, enable them to save on these inflated healthcare expenses. Let’s break it down:

Informed Decision-Making

Simply put: making benefits decisions isn’t easy. If it was, we’d all look forward to open enrollment and get excited about all of the options at our fingertips. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and open enrollment typically rolls around with feelings ranging from ambivalence to dread. With a tool like Nayya, HR teams can alleviate the pain points surrounding open enrollment for their teams and the employees across the organization.

Nayya Choose walks each employee through a basic getting-to-know-you questionnaire to gain insight into an employee’s lifestyle, health background, family status, and more. From there, Nayya uses AI to recommend the best plans for each employee’s unique health and financial needs. This ensures that each employee can select a plan that has their preferred doctors in-network, has the right type of coverage to manage any ongoing health conditions, and is setting the employee up for financial success by recommending just the right about to be contributing to any 401K, HSA, FSA or other savings plans.

Bringing a tool like Nayya into your upcoming open enrollment can alleviate some of the financial pain brought on by inflated medical expenses.

Cost Saving Guidance

Open enrollment may be the time of year we are all thinking about our benefits, but the fact is, benefits truly matter most the other 50 weeks of the year.

Nayya Use provides a user-friendly dashboard where employees can access any and all of their benefits information whenever they need. Your personalized dashboard hosts virtual benefit ID cards (no more digging through your bag at the front desk searching for that medical card), and wellness checklists to ensure that your preventative care is staying on track. But the true inflation-battling cost savings opportunities are Nayya Use’s in-network-care search, prescription savings alerts, and claims management. Since Nayya has a full view of your medical benefits, you can easily search for whatever type of care you need, and immediately find a filtered list of all providers available to you that are covered by your insurance. This means that whenever you’re receiving routine care, emergency services, or bringing a family member to a new doctor, you can rest assured that the doctor is in-network and won’t surprise you with an astronomical bill post-visit. In this economy, every dollar counts, and Nayya’s prescription savings feature helps you save money whenever you need to pick up medication. Simply drop the prescription name into Nayya Use, and access a list of each nearby pharmacy and how much that prescription would be at each location.

These are only a few of the ways Nayya Use can help your employees save money at the point of care.

Visit Nayya to learn more about Nayya Choose and Use and how they can help employees combat inflation in healthcare.