How did we save a company with 15 employees over $30,000 a year in health care costs?
Now that I have your attention, let me start by telling you that the headline above comes from an actual health insurance alternative quote presented to an accounting firm in late June 2018 located in California, with an overall nearly 40% annual savings! You are probably thinking to yourself, well sure, if I took out all the coverage’s I currently carry or offer to my employees, I can cut my costs by that much.
Well, this program and other alternatives like this are not about taking away coverage, minimizing coverage, or raising deductibles to unattainable amounts. This is about taking control of your health care costs. All too often as business owners we get focused on one aspect of our business expenses. Sometimes is not wanting to give our employee an hour $1 an hour. Sometimes it is not spending that extra $1,000 in our marketing budget, and almost always we tend to beat up our property and casualty insurance carriers to lower our premium costs, we are willing to take higher deductibles, put a risk management process in place, etc.
With all the above said, for all the things we get caught up in running our business, we have come to expect that our health insurance costs are a necessary evil. They are something we have to pay, we have to offer and we have to accept that we can not control it. Well all that is about to change.
For over 20 years, Myself, my employees, and others on my team have provided insurance solutions and risk management to thousands of clients. If truth be told, up until the last several months, I myself, a seasoned insurance professional have all but given up when it comes to both providing health insurance and securing it for my company.
So, what has changed is that we have made it our mission both as consumers and as insurance brokers to find a solution that will provide the best available health coverage, at the lowest cost possible. Now, thanks to our personal network, knowledge and amazing people who surround us, we want to share with you, our fellow business owners, HR and CFO folks our findings.
The first part of our solution is not a new alternative, but rather a long, well established health costs model called a Health Share. The Health Share finds it’s roots starting out in Christian ministries as a way for these like minded people to share the costs of their health care amongst each other. Usually, like, kind and quality insurance concepts fair with better results than one off coverage, because there is a peer to peer component that holds people accountable.
Some modern day Health Share’s have embraced the roots, but are not necessarily based in religion, but rather similar minded members who want to live healthier lifestyles, pay more attention to preventive health care, rather than reactive medicine. Next, because Health Shares on their own do not provide all the other bells and whistles we and our employees desire and have come to expect we had to find the right way to round out the products and create a full PPO type of program.
We know your employees want things like Dental, Vision, Co Pays, Low deductibles, Critical Illness, HSA’s, etc. And even if they don’t want to take those coverage’s at this stage in their life, they want to be offered it. So, We set out to find all of that. And, what we found was that we could not only get it all, but we could get it all by piecing together several different programs. In this case we also found a company willing to facilitate all of these offerings to make it seamless to you and your employees.
So, There you have it, our hard work has paid off. We expect that you will not just take our word for it, we are very well versed in health insurance, health care reform, Obamacare, and now Trumpcare, and even with all that said and the fact that we believe the costs will unfortunately continue to go up and get worse, we have kicked the tires on these alternatives, ruled in and ruled out products and offerings. Sat on our options for days at a time, and ultimately came up with the answer that there was more upside and more opportunity for the right company to take back control of their healthcare costs.
The end result and hopefully the beginning of the journey for you is that, we as consumers have figured out how to lower our own health Care costs, and as Insurance Brokers we have figured out how to offer unique health care solutions that we feel will provide the right business and its employees with annual savings that are anywhere between 35-50%.
