Group Health Insurance and Employee Retention

At Darr Schackow insurance, we keep getting more requests from small businesses for group health insurance quotes.  Why?  Most of the small businesses I work with say the finding and keeping good employees is the number one pain point.  Having great benefits like group health insurance is one way to retain good employees.  

What are the costs of having group health insurance?

Employers must pay at least 50% of the employees cost of the least expensive plan offered. When a small business asks for group health insurance quotes, we obtain quotes from Florida Blue, United Healthcare, Aetna, Humana, AvMed, and a few others.  Once we obtain those quotes, we review all of them and figure out which company and plan is best.  Typically, an employer will contribute at least $250/month towards employee benefits.  

Fifty percent of the eligible employees must participate in the plan by law.  This means that if we don’t have enough participation, the employer may have to increase the percentage of what they will pay for the health insurance.  For example, if we need more employees to participate, we will suggest bumping up the employer contribution to 70-80% to entice them to enroll.  Obviously, this drives the cost to the employer up, but, in order to be eligible for a plan, we must have the participation numbers meet the minimum.  Some employees are exempt from counting against you in the participation numbers.  If an employee is covered through a spouse’s plan, they don’t count against the employer’s participation numbers. 

I hope this helps you understand more about group health insurance and how to increase employee retention.