In the current modernized and fast-changing healthcare environment, small businesses continue to find innovative and cost-effective means of providing health benefits for their employees. Of late, one such alternative that has taken root is health sharing. Unlike the traditional insurance model, health sharing is a pool of resources whereby members contribute towards each other’s healthcare expenses. Therefore, Health Share may be an available alternative for your small business team. This article explains how you may introduce health sharing as a healthcare option for your small business team effectively.
Health Sharing: Potential Benefits for Small Businesses
Health sharing may offer some potential advantages for small businesses:
- Cost Savings: What attracts people most to health sharing is the potential for great cost savings, particularly for small business health sharing that may suffer from unmanageable traditional health insurance premiums. Health-sharing plans often are offered at lesser expense than other plans yet maintain critical coverages.
- Flexibility: Health-sharing organizations customarily offer various plans to help meet different healthcare needs such that employees will be able to choose what suits them and their dependents best.
- Personalized Care: Most of health-sharing organizations focus on a holistic approach to health care, encouraging preventive care and wellness. This may lead to healthier employees and lower costs overall for healthcare.
- Community Support: Members may share more than just expense-their experiences, and this can create a sense of community and support among the members participating.
Employee Needs and Preferences
Primarily, one needs to consider the needs and preferences of his or her employees before adopting a health-sharing plan. Anonymous surveying can determine the level of interest and what really matters to the employees in a healthcare package. Consider the following questions:
- What are your major concerns about health?
- Have you ever used health sharing? If you have, what has been your experience?
- What factors are most important to you as you consider a health-sharing plan (cost, coverage, flexibility, etc.)?
This will guide your decision and ensure that the health-sharing plan you select will meet the needs of your employees.
Investigate Health-Sharing Companies
Once you get a sense of the needs of your team, research health-sharing companies. Health-sharing plans are not the same and comparisons must be drawn based on:
- Cost: Determine the cost of monthly contributions and any extra fees that each organization charges.
- Coverage: Determine what medical expenses are covered, such as preventive care, emergencies, or specific treatment.
- Membership Requirement: Find out how a person can be a member and all the regulations to be followed by members.
- Reputation: This can best be done through current member reviews and testimonials on the reliability of an organization and customer service.
- Network Providers: Ensure the health-sharing organization has a network of health providers that your employees might prefer, or if members are allowed to choose their own providers.
Presenting Health Sharing to Your Team
After selecting the proper health-sharing organization, it’s time to introduce it to your employees. Here’s how to present health sharing effectively:
- Host an Informational Meeting: You can host a meeting where you’ll discuss the concept of health sharing, how it really works, and what kind of benefits one can expect from the plan that you have chosen. Be open about health sharing vs. traditional insurance so that the employees are properly informed about any concerns they may have.
- Distribute Educational Materials: Give them copies of brochures, FAQs, and comparison charts outlining the features of the health sharing plan. This will make it easier for them to understand and thus make better decisions.
- Encourage Questions and Discussions: Let the employees feel free to ask any questions or raise concerns. Answering them will help develop trust and allow them to accept the alternative.
- Share Testimonials: If possible, include a member of the health-sharing organization, testifying about their successes or present case studies to show the effectiveness of health sharing.
Process Implementation of the Health Sharing Plan
As soon as your team is interested in health sharing, it is time to take it to the next level and implement:
- Create an Enrollment Date: Determine when the date for employee enrollment into the health-sharing plan will be. You should establish some weeks of questions and answers for the employees to make their decisions.
- Assistance during Enrollment: This time of enrollment can help you make lots of assistance. All information that will be needed for transition without hustle and bustle should be available to the employees.
- Monitor Engagement and Feedback: Schedule regular checks with employees to solicit their experience feedback after implementing the system. Monitoring the level of satisfaction will help identify issues that may arise and address them promptly.
Promoting a Culture of Wellness
To reap the most benefits of health sharing, promote a culture of wellness among your small business. Engage workers to undertake preventive care services such as routine check-ups and health screenings that many health-sharing organizations encourage.
Consider providing wellness programs in the form of activities such as holding fitness challenges, mental health days, and nutrition workshops. In doing so, you can potentially reap some of these benefits like cutting down healthcare costs as well as increased productivity among employees.
Measure the Health Sharing Plan’s Success
Review periodically the success of the health-sharing plan a few months after installing it:
- Measure the Cost Savings: Track the savings that your business and its employees will realize against what they would have incurred if they had used traditional health insurance.
- Collect After-Survey Followups: Conduct the second impression of the health-sharing plan and identify areas of improvement.
- Change As Necessary: Always willing to update your decision based on employees’ needs as well as changes in health issues, take up more options if health sharing becomes successful within your team to better provide for their benefits.
Conclusion
Adding health sharing as an option for health care at work will help you save as much as money and allow a community among fellow workers to be supportive of each other. The advantages include employee health and wellness, through the development of a healthcare solution that improves employees’ physical and mental health, assessment of needs, research on various organizations, and effective communication of the option to your team. If wellness and support become the most important things, they can become a very priceless addition to the employee benefits strategy of your small business.
