Many owners of small businesses find that their well-intentioned desire to provide adequate medical cover for their employees becomes unsustainable. This is because medical costs end up taking an increasingly bigger chunk of the company's resources. This article offers some suggestions that owners of small businesses can implement to keep the cost of employees' medical insurance affordable.
Combine a Health Savings Account with High Deductible Health Insurance
Many insurance companies levy lower premiums for health insurance policies with high deductibles. A deductible refers to the amount of money that a policyholder has to spend in case an insured risk occurs. The lower premium levied will ease the pressure on the cash flow of your small company. You can also open a health savings account managed by your company. Your employees can contribute some of the money that goes into the health savings account. That money will be kept so that it can be used to cover the deductibles in case an employee needs medical attention. Any unused money in the pool will be carried forward to the next year. This approach will make it more affordable for you to provide medical cover to your employees. This is because the amount you put into the health savings pool may be much lower than what you would have spent to provide full medical cover with minimum deductibles.
Establish a Company Wellness Program
A wellness program will make your employees more aware of what they can do to stay healthy. This will lower the frequency of health issues that cost a lot of money to treat. For instance, you can initiate a program in which employees are trained how to design healthy meal plans or how to prevent common diseases. The cost you incur on such programs may be much lower than the cost of lengthy hospital stays.
Start Disease Management Schemes
This differs from a wellness program because the wellness program is aimed at prevention while the disease management program targets individuals with chronic illnesses like diabetes. The disease management scheme helps such individuals to work very closely with selected healthcare professionals (such as nurses) in order to take proactive steps to limit the occurrence of flare-ups. This will limit how often those employees are hospitalised. Fewer hospital visits will translate into lower costs met by your company.
Work with insurance brokers so that you identify an insurance company that will consider the measures that you have taken to keep the medical costs of your company affordable. That broker may also suggest additional measures that will reduce the burden of providing medical insurance for the employees of your small company.
Share24 November 2015
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