Health insurance is one of the largest expenses an employer has today.  Increasingly, employers are finding it difficult to offer affordable health coverage to their employees.  Many smaller employers have had to increase cost to employees, lower benefits, or cancel coverage altogether.  For businesses, this can be a risky proposition.  Studies by OSHA have shown that workers compensation claims actually rise when employees do not have access to major medical insurance.  Furthermore, employee absenteeism increases, which in turn affects a company’s productivity.

So what’s the answer?  At Flemployeeleasing we believe that finding affordable health insurance is essential to attracting and retaining your most valuable resource: your employees.  There are two ways to accomplish this.  Typically, employers go through insurance agents to find insurance in the “open market”.  This can be a great solution, but over time if plans are not shopped properly, rate increases can become oppressive to the business owner.  Flemployeeleasing works with PEOs that specialize in pooling thousands of small employers together to increase buying power. This ultimately provides participating companies with richer benefits at lower costs.  It only makes sense: a company employing 60,000 people will have far more bargaining power than will a 10 man company.  These economies of scale can be passed along to small businesses, ultimately lowering cost and increasing profits.  The challenge is finding the right PEO with a stable health insurance platform that will work for the long haul.  This is where Flemployeeleasing comes in.  Flemployeeleasing already has relationships with the very small group of companies that have the richest benefits platforms in the country.  More importantly these companies are financially sound and provide stable increases over time.  These stable increases mean more money in your company’s coffers and a better means for managing cash flow.

It’s important to bear in mind that health insurance brokered through a PEO is not right for all companies.  Some businesses, especially in the construction industry, have an average age that may be lower than the average age of the people at a large PEO.  In this situation it may make more sense for a small company to secure its own heath coverage through the “open market”.  While this is a great short term solution it must be managed properly.  When a company is in the “open market” for health insurance it’s extremely important for the company to manage certain elements and concerns properly:

1.      COBRA, while a great benefit for employees, can be a nightmare for employers.  If you have your own plan you want to make sure you are with a broker, i.e Flemployeeleasing, that knows how to administer this properly for you.

2.     Employee enrollments -- Employees’ knowledge of a health plan is essential to it being cost effective. This starts with a professional orientation.  Employees have to know the best way to access coverage to minimize cost to the plan.  Things like going to an urgent care facility rather than the ER can save an employer thousands of dollars per year in renewal costs.

3.     Participation- One of the biggest ways to keep an “open market” plan healthy is to have multiple people on the plan. The hope is that you have users and non-users alike on the plan.  This ultimately lends itself to fewer claims and lower renewals.

Most companies react to all these details by saying, “I don’t want to deal with all of this.” That’s a reasonable but dangerous reaction. We understand that these details are complex and feel very time consuming, but they are vitally important to the health of your business. When you partner with Flemployeeleasing, we will help you determine the best way to go.  All of your concerns and questions will be addressed, starting with whether or not it’s better for you to have stand alone health insurance or to partner with a PEO. If it seems better for your to have your own health we have someone administer it for you.  This is usually accomplished through our ASO platform (see hyper link for greater explanation of ASO).

The bottom line is you are in business to do what you do. For everything else, rely on licensed professionals with a broad experience base in PEO and open market health insurance.  Rely on the expertise of Flemployeeleasing.