Health Insurance for your Small Business
You have a successful small business, but you are having trouble keeping quality employees and it is affecting your bottom line. Have you considered a quality NY small group health insurance plan for your managers or for all full-time employees? If not, this might be why are have trouble keeping or attracting good employees.
Small group health insurance plans are the top employee benefit requested by employees. If you are not offering them to your employees, some other company will. And if you are already offering a health insurance plan, is your plan giving your employees all of the options and ancillary benefits they desire, all at an affordable price?
The fact is, for a small increase in hourly pay you can help provide a valuable and sought-after employee benefit to all or a select few of your employees in a tax preferenced way. In today’s competitive employment market, it is difficult to nearly impossible to find qualified employees for your business. When you don’t offer NY small group health insurance benefits to your employees, you lose out on a prime way to attract and retain good employees. Conversely, if you offer benefits that are construed as being skimpy or not a good fit to the employees, you can lose employees you already have. How can you implement an affordable small group health insurance plan without breaking the bank? Here are a few pointers.
Offer multiple group health plan options
Most insurance companies will allow you to offer a few plans side by side to your employees. This is good when your employees have different needs, or when some are young and single while others have a family to worry about. Some health insurance companies like Oxford health plans have not only multiple plans, but they also offer multiple networks of providers to choose from. When you offer the benefit to the employees, they can choose the plan and/or network that works best for their budget. This makes for a happy employee and higher participation amongst the employees.
Pay a fixed monthly contribution per employee
When you offer multiple plans and/or networks, there is likely to be a price difference between plans. Larger networks will afford a higher premium, and higher deductible plans will cost less than a low deductible plan for instance. So, how do you work this out when employees want to choose a high-priced plan? Simply contribute a fixed monthly premium towards coverage. This way, when an employee feels the need to purchase a bare bones plan, they do so knowing the company contribution will go further towards covering their premium compared to if they chose a high-priced plan. The employee gets to decide how best to spend their premium dollars contributed by the company. This is a fair way to deal with multiple plan options.
Set up any employee premium contributions on a pre-tax basis
Most plans can be set up with a Premium Only Plan (POP), aka IRS Section 125 plan. For employee premiums that are needed on top of the employer fixed contribution, any money an employee has taken from their paycheck can be done so on a pre-tax basis. In addition, there is no payroll tax due from the employer on the employees’ portion of the premium as well when this plan is set up. For a small setup fee, this is a great way to save tax dollars and have your premium contributions go further.
NY Small group health insurance plans are easy to implement. Simply request a quote or call us at 631-207-1800 and we would be happy to help you find and implement a plan for your business today!