Millennial health a concern for insurer

(AlexLipa / Depositphotos.com)

By Tim Curtis
TCurtis@TheDailyRecord.com

Millennials are seeing their health decline earlier than members of Generation X and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to know why – and to figure out how to address it before health care costs increase for workplaces and insurers.

A report on millennial health released earlier this year by the national Blue Cross Blue Shield Association found that millennials, on average, are seeing their health start to decline at age 27 rather than at 35, the age at which Blue Cross Blue Shield has expected health problems to begin.

CareFirst discussed the report Wednesday at a workshop in Owings Mills.

Among other findings, the report noted that older millennials were 11% more likely to have adverse health conditions than were Gen Xers at the same age.

“The easy anecdote is young people are healthy and old people are not,” Arif Khan, vice president for clinical programs and evaluation at CareFirst, said in an interview.  “I think what this is telling us is that at the surface level while that might be true… the reality is when you look at the underlying data for their health ... the millennials today are worse off in virtually all of those categories.”

The categories include higher rates of major depression, substance use disorder, hypertension, hyperactivity, inflammatory bowel disease, high cholesterol, tobacco use disorder and Type II diabetes.

The report comes from Blue Cross Blue Shield’s Health of America annual report, which looks at the association’s claims database to find health care trends among policyholders.

Among the findings: Millennials are not visiting their primary care physician at the same frequency as previous generations. Just 68% of millennials surveyed have a primary care physician.

“It isn’t that they are not going to access services, they are just accessing them in different ways,” said Brian Harvey, executive director of strategic services for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. He said that many millennials use urgent care, walk-in clinics and emergency rooms instead of primary care – which makes it difficult to track health care use.

Now that millennials are the largest generation in the workforce, employers and insurers need to pay attention to their health and to their potential health care costs.

Millennials may have lower health care costs now, but since they are developing health issues at higher rates than previous generations did, their future health care costs could be significantly greater down the line.

Executives at CareFirst said more needs to be done to meet millennials where they are. That includes learning about how millennials want to access their health care.

“You want to engage them early,” Khan said. “If you don’t create that connectivity early, it’s hard to keep them connected to their care.”

But that can be a challenge, he said. “Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I can’t wait to connect with my health care today.’”

CareFirst’s Healthworx team works with digital health startups, which, the company believes, may be better able to respond to the concerns of millennials.

“They are seeing these challenges of health care and actively developing solutions to change it,” said Michael Batista, CareFirst’s Innovation Partnerships director.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association also has been trying to figure out what’s behind the disparity in health trends between millennials and previous generations -- and what can be done to remedy the situation. The association plans a national event in Philadelphia in November to focus on millennial health.

“We don’t have the solution to it, but we are in the process of trying to understand what the issues are and the challenges,” Harvey said.

Khan said workplaces should consider how they can help their millennial employees better access health care.

He suggests programs that address employees’ health, such as wellness initiatives or gym memberships, lead workers to take charge of their health.

“When an employer actually advocates for, promotes, markets and even creates monetary incentives to do these things, that is when you see 80, 90% hit rates,” he said.