Using employee benefits to create an equitable workplace is perhaps the single biggest trend in the labor market today — but is it really working if those benefits don’t serve employees equally?
Just 46% percent of Black employees, 41% of Latinx employees and 36% of American Indian/Alaska Native employees are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance, according to a 2018 analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. This compares to 66% of their white counterparts. The disparity is largely due to the disproportionate presence of BIPOC employees in industries where providing healthcare isn’t a priority, such as the service industry and contractual work.
“For people of color, healthcare is both a financial experience and a health experience,” says David Vivero, CEO of Amino, a healthcare guidance platform. “There’s just not enough access and convenience to the care and support that keeps total costs down as well as prevents significant health episodes.”
Read More:
This leads minority employees to utilize primary care less frequently and rely on emergency care disproportionately, pushing their spending higher than their white colleagues. Around two in five Black workers currently have financial debt due to healthcare costs, averaging roughly $18,000 per person, according to statistics and surveys from QuickBook’s 2022 Black Business Health Report. More than a third of Black respondents doubt they will be able to pay this debt off during their lifetime, with 17% saying it is “somewhat unlikely” and 20% saying it is “very unlikely.” These statistics stay moderately consistent for other racial minorities as well.
“These are all systematic issues,” Vivero says. “You can see how institutions continue to reinforce this difference in care.”
To Vivero’s point, simply having access to coverage is not the solution it might sound like. Consider the realities of the pandemic: according to a 2020 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, Black people were 3.57 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people. Similarly, the risk of death within the Latinx population was nearly twice that of the white population.
But these communities have been grappling with ineffective care long before COVID. A 2020 study from the National Library of Medicine shows that between 2005 and 2016, medical professionals were 10% less likely to admit Black patients to the hospital than white patients, increasing their death rate. Universal experiences like family-building are high risk for employees of color — Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women due to medical negligence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And Asian Americans suspect they would receive better healthcare if they were of a different race or ethnicity compared to only 1% of white Americans, according to Marlette Jackson, senior director of global justice, DEI and employee experience at Virgin Pulse.
“When it comes to having a regular doctor that you trust, we see barriers and challenges,” she says.
For example, when receiving healthcare, 40% of mainly Spanish-speaking Hispanic and Latino people report communication problems with their physicians, Jackson explains, compared to only 26% of the same population who speak primarily English. That’s where folks like Vivero are trying to help. The platform he leads, Amino, is an employer-provided digital app that workers can download to access resources and insight on their healthcare needs, built upon anonymous claims data analyzed by Amino. An employee can input whatever healthcare query they have and receive responses tailored to their situation, including an entirely Spanish-language option for non-native English speaking employees.
Read More:
“We look at that data and ask, where are these people going to get care?” Vivero says, adding that this criteria can help any marginalized community find better care. “How can we infer? Who’s providing consistent accessible care? If someone does need transgender care, they could use Amino and find primary care providers, endocrinologists, urologists and other folks that specialize in or at least have significant exposure to and experience with that patient population.”
But even without the help of a third-party program, employers can still take independent steps to improve quality of care across their workforce. From providing mental health support or increasing paid sick leave to encourage employees to actually seek care when they need it, a supportive environment will empower employees to flag and discuss any disparities they may be experiencing.
“We know that well-being, mental health and the ER are inextricably linked,” Jackson says. “And if you are sufferingbecause you’re navigating healthcare issues and your employer is not providing you with an infrastructure to help you, that’s going to take a toll on your professional life.”
For employers who want to understand their specific community of employees and their needs, additional tech and data-driven tools are hitting the market to provide insight. For example, insurance company AON has designed a Health Disparity Assessment tool, which can help employers identify employees at risk, measure health disparity within their workforce and recommend solutions.
Read More:
“The pandemic really brought forward the issue of health disparity to our client population,” says Khris Dai, leader of Aon’s HDA data analytics. “A lot of [employers] wanted to know where their disadvantaged populations were located.”
The disparity assessment gives employers insight on what kind of care may or may not be available to their employee population based on location, areas of care that have had more outcomes and which areas are being underutilized by their employees. With these insights, employers can begin to tailor their offerings.
Companies that don’t recognize their role in supporting BIPOC employees are going to lose out on a lot of talent, Vivero predicts. And the companies that do find ways to provide equitable, competent care will see improved retention.
“People of color are increasingly aware of companies that are taking this seriously,” Vivero says. “They’ll use that when they choose their next employer. So attracting those folks to come and stay at their companies in part will depend on how aware benefits leaders are of these types of issues.”
