Haleigh Tebben, Partner at Mercer explains how you should think about healthcare benefits from being an early stage startup with only one or two people until you grow to 100+ employees.
It’s going to depend on where the organization is and what kind of funding is available. On certain levels, a lot can be done on the individual marketplace, but at some point, organizations want to start offer benefits, and so that’s when you start to get into the idea of working with a carrier partner and having a fully insured benefit offering, making sure you hit on all the basics.
As you grow and evolve that’s when it’s definitely important as you are seeing 20-30% headcount growth or more year over year to start bringing in some experts to help you think about the future strategy. We’ve worked with clients as small as 100+ to help them start thinking about that long-term strategy so that they are doing things now that will put them in a position to grow in the future.
What we don’t want is for them to make decisions now that are going to be difficult for them to undo in the future, so we’re definitely here to support. There is a lot of great information out there. We publish an annual survey, the national employee survey that can help organizations know what is happening.
It’s just about making sure that at that point a lot of it is probably providing them with resources to go on the individual marketplace or if they want to offer a plan going through a carrier and have a fully insured offering at that point.
For organizations that don’t want to offer a group medical coverage, there are obviously the individual marketplaces that you’ve heard a lot about. Through the Obamacare exchanges, there are some companies that have created solutions where you can get insured as one. You can give them your information and they can help you navigate the individual marketplace to help you figure out what kind of benefits you could be eligible for if you’re eligible for any kind of federal subsidies, in that process or not.
Some small organizations with only one or two people are probably not able to get group medical coverage going yet or probably cannot afford it, so that’s when they can go to the individual marketplace if need be.