As a business owner you are looking to attract, hire, and retain the best employees you can. One key way to do this is to offer group benefits. However, if you have never offered group benefits before, it can be confusing, messy, and honestly hard to understand sometimes. In today’s world there are so many different benefits you can offer to your employees, but not only that, there are so many regulations and laws regarding these benefits. To try to tackle it on your own may be overwhelming!
Let’s start by discussing a few different types of benefits:
Health Insurance – A group health insurance policy is established and maintained by the employer and it provides the employee medical coverage for themselves and their dependents. Coverage will include routine office visits, diagnostic testing, emergency visits, and prescriptions. In addition to offering a group health insurance policy, you can use creative funding options such as a Flexible Spending Account (FSA), Health Savings Accounts (HSA), or Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRA) to help offset employee costs.
Vision Insurance – Group vision insurance is designed to help you cover and budget for ongoing vision care expenses such as annual eye exams, prescription glasses, and contact lenses. Depending on your carrier and selected options, basic exams, frames and lenses, and contact lenses are often covered with group vision insurance. Depending on the type of your business, the number of employees, etc., some carriers may also attach a rider to the group vision insurance policy to cover things like safety glasses.
Dental Insurance – Dental insurance is coverage to help protect employees against high dental procedure costs. Insurance companies offer many different levels of coverage, and you can elect which options to have, such as basic and major services. Depending on group size, employers may also offer their employees orthodontic coverage. There are different networks depending on the carrier, so it’s very important to make sure the network has an adequate number of providers for you and your employees to see.
Group Life Insurance – Group life insurance is a very low-cost benefit to offer your employees. There are many advantages to offering life insurance as it will be guaranteed issue for employees on the basic term policy with no medical questions to be answered, and you could also offer additional life insurance on a voluntary basis that the employees pay for and can take with them if they should leave their employment with.
These are just a few of the benefits most businesses are concerned about offering, but there are other voluntary benefits such as accident insurance, critical illness, even pet insurance! How do you know which ones to choose? How do you stay compliant with the laws and on top of changes? This is where Gannon Associates Insurance can help you!
At Gannon Associates Insurance we can help you by staying on top of major changes in health care reform as they develop and have licensed staff who are certified and ready to assist you. Our Benefits staff are always continuing their training and learning the different trends in the benefits world. Once you start offering benefits, we will help you with service needs such as doing enrollment meetings for your employees, submitting applications, and keeping you in the loop with communications to the carrier, ensuring a smooth transition for all new members.
We work with many different insurance companies, so we are able to assist you in finding the plans that work best for you and your needs. Give us a call at 844-GANNONS to learn more today!
