There are many articles dealing with the question of the pros and cons of offering health insurance to your employees. Just search online for Small Business Health Insurance NY as an example. You will find articles to both support and refute the benefits of a small group health insurance plan. So, who do you believe when it is time for you to decide to offer group health benefits or not? Here are a few quick questions you should be asking yourself.
Our company can’t afford group health insurance
This is perhaps the first question we hear from our small business health insurance NY clients and prospects. Plans for a single employee in New York typically range from $500 – $900 per month. So, if we use an average of $700 per month, an employee working 40 hours per week at 4.33 weeks per month will cost an additional $4.05 per hour to fully insure. If you are splitting costs with the employee, this number goes down in half.
The question then becomes this; do you think by offering to pay 50% of an employee’s health insurance premium at a cost of $2 per hour will help you attract more qualified and loyal employees? Seems like a simple answer to me.
We don’t have time to administer and manage the health plan
I can see someone new to health insurance might think this is a problem. Shopping for health insurance can seem intimidating. Administering a plan seems daunting as you would need to know all the ins and outs of a plan, and for someone new to this it seems insurmountable. However, there is someone available for FREE to help you! As a small business health insurance NY broker, we take on the administrative burden and help you shop for, purchase, administer, and renew your group health insurance plan. And we do this at no cost to you, with no increased premium or cost.
We can’t find one policy to fit all our employees’ health needs
While it seems like it would be hard to find a plan that fits every employee’s needs, the simple solution is to offer multiple options! But you would ask isn’t this difficult and confusing to administer? The simple answer is NO. Plans such as HealthPass as just one example allow employees to choose from multiple insurance carriers, and offer multiple plans within these carriers. This way you do not have to choose a plan to fit everyone, you just choose a health carrier that allows for many options.
We have employees who work in different states
Having employees in different states can pose some issues when looking for health plans. However, there are some solutions for this as well. Many insurance companies have national networks, thus an employee working in another state could access the group health plan’s network anywhere they are. The key here is again working with a knowledgeable health insurance broker who can assist you in finding plan options that have national network access.
When trying to figure out if offering small business health insurance for your company is worth it or not, you should use the arguments above to help you overcome the fear and concern of implementing a plan. In today’s competitive job market, a small investment can help you attract and retain the most valuable part of a company…it’s employees.