• Some employers opt for self-insured health plans.gesundheitsreform image by elvira gerecht from Fotolia.com
  
  If you work for a company that has a self-insured group health plan, your employer has assumed the financial risk of providing your health care benefits. In other words, your employer pays every time a claim is submitted instead of paying a set premium to an insurance carrier. Employers who opt for the self-insured plan often have a trust fund set aside to cover health care expenses.
  
  

Risk Retention Groups

• The risk retention group is an owner-controlled self-insurance plan that is licensed by its home state. Once the risk retention group is licensed, it can insure members in all states. Risk retention groups fall under the Liability Risk Retention Act, which is a federal law that makes it easier for risk retention groups to operate nationally.
  
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Captive Insurance Companies

• Captive insurance companies finance risk from their parent groups and sometimes they insure the risks of the groups' customers, which would be a company's employees. Captive insurance companies are used to keep the profit that a third-party insurance company would have made or to provide coverage when it otherwise would not have been available.
  
  

Stop Loss

• Employers may purchase stop-loss insurance, which reimburses them for claims that exceed a certain amount. An insurance contract exists between the stop-loss carrier and the employer, but this isn't a health insurance policy. Employers buy stop-loss coverage to limit their liability under self-insured health plans.
  
  

Specific and Aggregate

• Specific stop-loss coverage starts when a claim reaches the financial limit selected by the employer. After that, this type of policy pays claims up to the lifetime limit per employee.
  
  Aggregate stop-loss coverage means that when the total group health claims reach a set limit chosen by the employer, stop-loss is initiated.