When starting a small or medium business, capital is always one of the principle issues; it’s hard to maintain the numbers and burn rates can drive us crazy. So, sometimes it’s hard to get your employees all the benefits they deserve. Nevertheless, if you’re one of those responsible employers that have finally grown enough to provide health insurance to your staff, then we’re here to help you.
First of all, you need to take three principal questions into consideration before actually selecting the health insurance your company will provide. Here’re the questions and why they’re important.
How much is it going to cost?
Knowing how much you’ll pay for a plan is obviously the first thing to take into consideration when hiring employee’s health insurance for the first time. You need to take into consideration the demographics of your employees so you can pay for what they actually need and save in what’s less important.
There’re generally two types of plans:
- High-premium, low-deductible plans: ideal for older employees that would need more regular health care coverage
- High-deductible, low-premium plans: ideal for younger employees that would take more advantage of low premiums and might be willing to pay higher deductibles for it.
- For that matter there’re also two types of categories for helping you now the range of coverage on a health insurance:
- Premium: 90% covered and 10% deductible.
- Gold: 80% covered and 20% deductible.
- Silver: 70% covered and 30% deductible.
- Bronze: 60% covered and 40% deductible.
They can also be found as no deductible, low deductible, and a high deductible. Finally, you need to take into consideration the total deductible and the “out-of-the-pocket” limit which also affect the cost of the plan.
What does the plan coverage include?
Checking the coverage is also important and affects the budget as the more options available for the employees, the more the plan will cost. Make sure the rules for limiting the excessive access to services are very clear in the contract. The basic minimum coverage tends to be:
- Treatment without the need for hospital admittance.
- E.R visits
- Treatment with hospital admittance.
- Natal care: pre and post.
- Mental and substance abuse treatment.
- Chronic conditions treatment.
- Lab tests.
- Vaccines and other preventive services.
- Pediatric services.
Does the pan include a network of doctors?
One way to reach some good plans with a little lower cost is by acquiring insurance that works with a network of doctors. This means that the insurance company agrees with some doctors so the patients under the policy will only visit those doctors. These are called Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and are also ideal for younger population of employees as it might be a little bit less comfortable as they would need to go to a specific doctor whether or not it’s near and they would need approval for a different doctor or pay more for the visit.
On the other hand, there’re health insurance plans where the patient chooses the doctor of their preference which is more suitable for older employees that have more problems with moving around the city. The disadvantage is that these Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) are a little bit more expensive for the company.
Posted by Randy Blakeslee – GetnSocial
