One of the major concerns when making the decision to offer health care benefits to your employees is cost. Health care costs continue to rise each year making it difficult to start or continue offering benefits. There are several steps you can take to help manage your costs.
- Work with an experienced representative. You’re not a health insurance specialist, so you should make sure you work with one. You should find and agent or broker you can trust who has years of experience and access to multiple programs. A good agent will utilize plan design and competition in the marketplace – among other things – to design a plan that meets your needs and your budget
- Access to wellness programs and technology. Technology and wellness programs are becoming important tools in health and health care management. On-line wellness management systems help to engage employees and encourage them to make healthy choices using fun, easy, and trackable activity platforms. Easy access to doctors through telemedicine services such as video chats, phone consulting and mobile aps is becoming an increasingly important option. Your agent should be able to help set up access to all these services.
- Utilize flexible contribution programs. You can offer flexible spending arrangements like Health Savings Accounts (HSA), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) or Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRA). These plans allow you as the employer (HRA or FSA) and your employee (FSA or HSA) to contribute to an account that can be used to pay for approved medical expenses often on a pre-tax basis. These tools, in conjunction with plan design, help manage health care premiums and as the employer, you maintain control over the program.
- Keep track of legislation. Unless you are constantly monitoring changes in healthcare legislation, there is no way to keep up! Your agent should be able to keep track of updates to laws surrounding healthcare and keep you up to date ensuring you are compliant and can act quickly if changes are needed.
- Advocate and Educate. In the event of a claim, your agent should advocate on your behalf and for your employee. You should also have access to on-line tools and expertise to educate your employees helping them make better choices which can lead to lower costs for both of you.
With representative across the country, Agri-Services Agency is a healthcare partner you can trust. ASA has been providing healthcare solutions to the agriculture industry for 50 years. We can help design cost effective health plans for small businesses with only a few employees or large multi-location operations with hundreds of employees.
Give us a call today at 1-877-466-9089 or visit our website at agri-servicesagency.com for more information on what we can offer. You can also click here to fill out a form and request additional information. We look forward to hearing from you!