Should Your Small Business Offer Healthcare Benefits?

To be competitive, businesses need to attract and retain the best talent they can find. That kind of talent has options. You need more than attractive salary and a friendly work environment to land good workers today. A key factor that workers consider when deciding to take a job is the benefits. And the benefit foremost in their minds is healthcare.

Most small businesses in the United States have under 20 employees. Federal law does not require a business that small to offer healthcare benefits, and the only state in the Union that requires a business of any size to offer healthcare benefits is Hawaii. But that doesn’t mean you should not seriously consider it. Attracting good employees is just one of the reasons.

Employer Advantages of Offering Group Healthcare Benefits

Attract and Retain Great Talent

As we’ve just mentioned, one of the biggest reasons that businesses invest in healthcare benefits is to make them competitive in recruiting and keeping good workers. Good healthcare benefits may even enable them to attract top talent working for the competition. It sure beats losing good employees to the competition because you don’t offer healthcare benefits.

After all, about half of the US population gets healthcare benefits through their employers. To put it plainly, if you are not offering good healthcare benefits, you are not going to get or keep the best workers.

And it’s not easy to get good workers these days. At the end of November 2022 there were well over 10 million open jobs in the United States. Workers can pick and choose, particularly in some fields where unfilled jobs are expected to increase even more in the years to come.

Reduce Hiring Costs

Even though it costs businesses to offer healthcare benefits, they get a bit of that back. Employee prospects are often willing to take jobs at lower pay when those jobs offer good healthcare benefits.

Why? It costs a lot more for people to pay individual coverage than group coverage through an employer.

Increase Productivity with a Healthier Staff

If your staff doesn’t have healthcare coverage, they are far less likely to go to the doctor when they are sick or get checkups. And certainly, they are less likely to seek out preventive care to keep themselves from getting sick in the first place.

How productive do you think your workplace will be with staff who get sick and don’t get treated for a quick recovery? It’s not even a question that unaffordable healthcare results in more sick days. And when your staff is taking a lot of sick days or working while ill, it affects the productivity of your business.  A study found that healthy workers are three times more productive.

Get a Tax Break

If you offer health benefits, you can deduct your part of the contribution from your taxes. And if you’re incorporated, you may also be able to deduct the full amount of your own benefits.

The Problem: Good Group Rates for Healthcare Benefits Are Hard to Find for Small Business

The advantage for your workers of getting health benefits through an employer is the group rates. Group rates can be a lot cheaper than rates for individuals. Of course, that means you can also take advantage of those group rates for your benefits. However, group rates decrease according to the amount of people in the plan. So as a small business, you are at a disadvantage. Because small businesses have many fewer employees than big businesses, they can find it difficult to get good group rates for healthcare.

Sure, there are different ways to spread that cost around. A business could opt to

• Pay all healthcare benefits costs for its workers
• Share costs with workers
• Make group healthcare benefits available but require workers to pay all costs.

Many small businesses cannot afford to cover all healthcare benefits costs for their workers or even to share the costs. Workers on the other hand, may be unable to shoulder the costs of healthcare benefits which typically cost 5% to 6% of their income.

The Answer: Healthcare Benefits Tailored for Small Business

What many small businesses need is healthcare benefits that are

• Affordable: In the range of $30 to $100 per month per worker
• Inclusive: Covers small businesses, entrepreneurs, sole proprietorships, workers’ families and even freelancers
• Flexible: Offers a choice of payment options so businesses can select the best way to pay: the business pays all, the worker pays all or they share the expense.

Now you can get healthcare benefits that fill your needs with UmbrellaCare. UmbrellaCare was created for small businesses just like yours. Even if you rely on freelancers, you can gain their loyalty by offering them health benefits at a great rate through UmbrellaCare.

Want to know more about UmbrellaCare healthcare benefits? Call us Umbrella Local at 1 (866) 760-2638 or contact us though the Umbrella Local website.