You may be a small business but, to Bestefits, your issues are big. We understand the needs of small employers and look forward to providing you with the attention and flexibility of a small brokerage combined with the level of consultation and resources of a large brokerage. We don’t force you to adopt the process that works best for us. Your needs drive our solutions, services and resources. Together, we will work to create the Best-Fit employee benefit program for your budget and your environment.
The Biggest Benefit Obstacles for Small Employers
BUDGET
It is rare that we speak with a small employer that does not want to offer, at least, medical insurance to its employees. Of employers that don’t presently offer coverage, the cost of premium contributions and employee participation requirements are the primary obstacles.
For small employers that currently offer group medical insurance and other employee benefits, the rate of premium increases has forced frustrating compromises. Most have absorbed the increases, passed a portion of increases to employees, downgraded benefit levels or a combination of each of these strategies.
Bestefits has good news for you! As a result of the great need for innovation in this complex industry, our firm was designed to be on the leading-edge of emerging strategies, new products and offers proprietary cost-saving tools. Read more about the many things we do to help you get the best value for your benefit dollars.
Budget solutions
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Benefit Minds
This is one of our most exciting and impactful benefit strategy and medical insurance cost-containment offerings to Bestefits clients. For those just learning more about us, this is the equivalent of having several of the top benefit strategists all working together on solutions for your organization. Learn more by scheduling a meeting to discuss your benefits insurance program.
Health Care Reform Expertise
Health Care Reform, also known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), Affordable Care Act (ACA) and popularly called Obamacare, has many cost and administrative implications for employer-sponsored group medical insurance as well as other interacting group medical-related benefits. Bestefits can model the financial, administrative and legislative impact of this law on your organization, help you to minimize the cost of applying necessary changes and evaluate alternatives.
Private and Public Exchange Options
Each company has unique needs and that is why Bestefits does not believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. While many employers are well-suited with direct-to-carrier product arrangements, other employers are intrigued by the defined contribution model that makes employer contribution costs more predictable and the number of carrier choices provided by public and private exchanges. If you are an employer who is interested in this strategy, we can help you with public exchange solutions, including Covered California’s SHOP exchange, as well as the Bestefits private exchange solution or other private exchange solutions, including CaliforniaChoice.
Product Design
By working with Bestefits, you receive an objective review of all of the top-rated insurance carriers and products. We help you to evaluate a wealth of insurance products from Anthem, Aetna, Blue Shield, CIGNA, DeltaDental, The Guardian, HealthNet, Humana, Kaiser, Lincoln Financial, MetLife, Principal, The Standard, SeeChange, United Healthcare, Unum and many more! To the untrained eye, many insurance products look alike. This often causes people to choose among a family of plans, based primarily on premium, only to later utilize the plan and experience surprising out-of-pocket costs. With our guidance, you will better understand the unique details of each plan so you can determine whether or not premium costs are outweighed by expenses not covered by the plan. As an employer, the number and combination of plans you offer to your employees has a great effect on their satisfaction and your bottom line. Bestefits works with you to create the benefits program menu that best suits your unique needs.
Negotiation
Unlike the large employer group market, small group medical insurance rates are generally not negotiable. However, most of the other important lines of benefit insurance coverage have a bit wiggle room. Effective negotiation with insurance carriers for Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D, Disability and other forms of group coverage can create the best benefit level at the best price for your organization. Let us help you to enhance your employee benefits program with the lines of coverage that help you to create a well-rounded offering and attract the employees you need to grow your business.
Contribution Strategy
Your contribution strategy is an important element of your overall employee benefits package. There are a number of different contribution solutions that help you to drive specific participation behavior, have different impacts on the predictability of your benefit spend and accomplish unique results. Bestefits provides you with various models of contribution strategies through private and public exchanges and direct to market solutions so that you are equipped to design a contribution methodology that accomplishes your program goals.
Funding Strategies
Not only do employee benefit insurance programs help you to attract and retain your valuable employees but they are an important vehicle for reducing your tax liabilities. IRS code Section 125 plans are a great way to maximize these tax advantages. Premium Only Plans (P.O.P.) allow you to deduct employees’ portions of their premiums through payroll on a pre-tax basis. This reduces their taxable income and reduces your taxable payroll by reducing FICA and Worker’s Compensation expenses. Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRA’s), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA’s) and Health Savings Accounts (HRA’s) are popular Section 125 plan vehicles that can help you to reduce plan premiums while enhancing plan benefits. Bestefits educates your employees about these plans to drive engagement and participation. They save more money and you further reduce your payroll tax liability by encouraging their additional contributions to qualified plans.
The majority of employers with fewer than 50 employees are fully-insured. However, the rate of premium increases has enticed small employers to learn more about the benefits of self-funding and partial self-funding. There are many important dynamics about your employee population, financial administration sophistication and ability to manage a more complex arrangement that must be fully understood to in order to determine whether self-funding would be safe for your organization to consider. Self-funding is not common in the small group employer market but this is changing and it is always worth learning more to prepare for changes as you grow.
Best-Fit Employee Benefits Communication
In discussions with small employers, customized and effective employee benefit communication is the area that is requiring a whole new level of support. This is an area where Bestefits excels and will make your program into something you are truly proud of and your employees truly appreciate. We firmly believe that employee benefit communication about plan utilization, planning of non-emergency medical procedures and healthcare consumerism education will drive the long-term cost controls on healthcare expenditure that employers need to positively affect their risk pools and resulting rates. It is our philosophy that extra Bestefits time and resources spent in this area will contribute to a more stable industry as a whole and impact the stability of your program over the long-run.
Ready to Contact Us?
We look forward to working with you to create the Best-Fit employee benefit program for your organization.
Complete the form to tell us more about your company and we will contact you.
Or call us to discuss your needs.
Paul Achee
Phone: 805-290-1620
Paul Achee
Phone: 805-290-1620
ADMINISTRATIVE RESOURCES
It is no question that offering employee benefits is complicated and time-consuming, especially for the small business. Most small employers do not have a multi-person department that can be dedicated to all of the necessary paperwork, track all employment changes that affect benefit eligibility, gain comprehensive insurance knowledge to address employees’ benefit questions or address the ever-changing legislation that governs benefit offerings. Bestefits is appreciated most by our small employer clients for being, not just a broker or business partner, but an integral part of their executive team and benefits department. We provide you with the resources you need in order to do more with less!
Administrative resources
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Bestefits Processing
Benefit plan administrators know that adding a benefit eligible employee or terminating a benefit participant means handling paperwork, logging into multiple systems and hoping you didn’t miss an important step. These processes can interrupt your day and take time that would be better spent elsewhere. Let Bestefits handle your new benefit eligible employee additions and terminations. You send us the information we need to make the change and we email you upon completion.
Carrier Communication Management
Although there are times when the employer must contact the insurance carrier with questions or issues, many questions and issues can be handled by Bestefits. This saves you precious time and provides security in knowing that an insurance professional is resolving your issue.
Employee Advocacy
Some employees have complicated benefits insurance questions, health circumstances they do not wish to disclose to their employer or claims issues that require additional support for resolution. Bestefits has found that by providing time for individual questions during Open Enrollment and describing our role in your benefits program, employees understand that we are their advocate for important insurance issues that must be escalated and are comfortable contacting us for help.
Bestefit Employee Benefit Communication
Studies have consistently shown that, without effective and engaging employee benefit communication, employee populations perceive the value of their benefits to be far lesser than the true value. These studies also show that even a relatively slim benefits offering receives higher value ranking from employees of companies with a strong benefit communication strategy. We work with you to create a communication strategy that works for your environment and enhances your employees’ perceptions of the time and money you spend providing for their health and well-being.
Tools & Technology
Although Health Care Reform (aka Obamacare) has created a lot of work and concern about compliance, it has also stirred some much needed innovation. More companies are bringing new solutions to the table to help automate many benefit processes, store benefit information and delivering money-saving tools. Bestefits offers some proprietary tools that address these needs and also helps employers to evaluate other tools and services in the marketplace. We support your adoption of the tools and services that best fit your needs and will help you through the implementation process where appropriate.
ACCESS TO EXPERTISE
Many of the same laws that govern the benefit practices of large organizations also apply to small organizations. However, small employers tend to do a lot of research and work on their own. As a result, they risk not taking important actions or following appropriate procedures because they believe that the caliber of guidance they need will not be affordable.
The beauty of the Bestefits model is that we can nearly always offer this expertise and wealth of solutions at the same cost as your current brokerage with zero impact to your current premiums. This has created an extremely positive response from the small employer environment and is the best-fit solution to the increasing needs of the small organization.
Access to expertise
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Health Care Reform Specialization
Health Care Reform expertise provides us with the training and knowledge to help you implement the numerous requirements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), understand compliance deadlines and model the financial impact of these changes on your organization. We enjoy helping to make the complex regulations that effect your benefits program easier to understand and easier to manage. Bestefits places professional certifications and continued education among its core values. We believe that by remaining dedicated to expanding our professional development, we can continue to deliver top-of-industry excellence to clients who have come to need a higher level of consulting and guidance in today’s economic and legislative environment.
Benefit Minds
It’s no question that the employee benefits program touches many important elements of your business and is more complex now than ever before. We know it’s a wonderful thing to have a broker with strong insurance knowledge but wouldn’t it be even better to have a group of the top benefit minds working together on your program? The benefits program has an enormous impact on multiple complicated areas of your business, each requiring specialization, including tax implications, legislative compliance, financial modeling, contribution strategies, payroll/HR systems, employee recruitment & retention and more. Benefit Minds focuses top mind power on your issues to create your best-fit solutions. In addition, we have gathered a group of incredible partners who bring a whole new level of impact to your benefit program by connecting the dots to the strategic goals of your organization and perpetuation.
Benefits Compliance Expertise
Employers who offer employee benefits are pushed and pulled between Federal and State Government regulations, scrutinized by the DOL, HHS, IRS, and must navigate an overwhelming number of laws including PPACA, HIPAA, COBRA, DOMA, GINA, FMLA and more. The amount of change and liability is undoubtedly increasing. Many executives feel that they are spending more time learning about and responding to the changing legislation that affects the viability of their organization than accomplishing the tasks that bring in revenue. Bestefits provides benefit administration support to act as an extension of your benefit team and provides direction to help you respond to the legislative requirements that apply to your company.
COMPANY CULTURE
Your company and its culture are unique. This is why Bestefits serves as your objective consultant. We represent all of the available options and work with you to create the comprehensive program and design specifics that best-fit your organizational goals and dynamic employee population. We don’t believe in proprietary sales processes designed to accomplish our sales goals. Your needs drive our process, services and resources from start to finish. With this approach, your benefits program and Bestefits become an integral part of your success.
Company culture
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Employee Benefit Survey
Many employers have been pleasantly surprised by the results of employee benefit surveys. Instead of the initial anticipation of employee demand for the most comprehensive and expensive benefit plans available on the market, most employees want a reasonable amount of choice and additional low cost benefits that result in greatly enhanced overall value. These customized surveys give you the information you need before evaluating changes so that you can get closer to the bulls-eye for your budget and your employees.
Direct Employee Advocacy
Our team is available for individual employee questions during Open Enrollment and throughout the year. It is a great enhancement to their enrollment experience and helps to alleviate many of the questions directed to your Human Resource team. Employees of Bestefits clients know who we are and know that we are there to help them with the complex benefits insurance issues that are not easily solved over the phone or through email with the insurance carrier. We provide advocacy for their complex claims issues so they have the right people on their side when they need it most.
Customized Benefit Communication
From Open Enrollment Announcements to mid-year benefit education and wellness notices, we customize the benefit communication materials that drive an entirely different level of employee engagement. These materials help to prepare employees for benefit changes, educate them on benefit choices that will save them money and positively impact your plan. We provide wellness information to support healthy choices and remind them of the effort you put into caring for their health and well-being. You will be surprised at the responses you receive from your employees and the level of satisfaction they report.
Creating Choice
Bestefits works with you to determine the right program choices for your employment environment. Narrowing selections to those that best-fit your environment but leaving room for choice allows you to protect the overall cost of your benefits program while still creating the right amount of flexibility for your employees. Our clients have access to multiple options for accomplishing this goal and addressing the needs of different employees groups, whether they are drivers on the road or in-office employees.
COMPLIANCE SUPPORT
Most small employers have difficulty finding the time to focus on changing legislation that affects the benefits program and staying up-to-date with compliance requirements. Bestefits provides guidance and compliance resources to make sure clients have access to the information that helps them take necessary actions to stay in compliance, reduce risk and avoid penalties.
Compliance support
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Additional Compliance Resources
Bestefits has access to a number of compliance resources that allow us to be a great first-stop for many of your employment-related compliance questions. Employee handbook templates, sample notices and guidance on employment-related procedures are available for your use. For more complicated issues, where legal advice or specialized consulting is needed, you may access our trusted advisor network.
Compliance Reviews
Bestefits will conduct a compliance review of your current program and provide recommended changes as well as their likely administrative and financial impact. On an on-going basis, Bestefits clients receive compliance information to guide their current programs and plan for future changes. With Bestefits you can feel confident that you have a brokerage that is helping you to protect against the compliance risks of your benefit program.
Ready to Contact Us?
Complete the form to tell us more about your company and we will contact you.