Are You a Small Business Owner

As a small business owner you have many things to think about on a day to day basis.  But how often do you think about health care for you and your employee’s?  With health care insurance cost rising at such a high rate, it is becoming harder to be able to afford to offer health care benefits.  Unfortunately the trend on rising cost does not appear to be slowing down.  It is now estimated that 30% or more business’s are saying they will stop offering employer based health insurance to their employee’s in the near future due to the rising cost.  The Kaiser Foundation show the cost in 2011 to average over $14,000 per year per employee, for  family coverage. 

So as a small business owner what do you do?  You want to be able to offer employee benefits, but can you afford to keep doing it?  You do have options, you can drop health care as part of your benefit package, you can increase the employee share of the cost, are you can become creative, an find different combinations of programs to offer your employee’s.  There are several combinations available to you. 

1)      Go with a high deductible healthcare insurance with no dr. co-pay or any other add one’s, which will lower your cost.

2)      Add a discount program to it to lower the Dr. Visit cost.  With Dental, Visions, Rx, ECT. (you could let the employee pay for this thru payroll deduction)

3)      Enroll in an HRA program which would allow you to cover some of these costs for your employee (with a reimbursement arrangement) and use it as a tax savings for your company.

4)      Offer an accident plan to your employee’s that would pay per covered accident.

As you can see there are options that you can use.  JE Health Care Solutions can assist you with finding the right options.  We represent different companies such as Renco Direct, NACD (National Association of Consumers Direct), BaseHRA, and many others.

We at JE Health Care Solutions are here to work with you and your employee’s.  

The main thing you need to do as a business owner, is find out what programs will work for you and that you can afford.  By offering benefits to your employee’s you will be able to keep them.  

GOP Payroll Tax Bill - Summary, Text Of Health Care Sections

The bill is, "Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act", which would extend the payroll-tax cut scheduled to expire at the end of 2011, extend unemployment insurance and avoid the scheduled cut to Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians - the "doc fix."  Kaiser Health News as posted the section that deals with Health care.   CLICK HERE  to read the summary.

Medicare Is Taking A Page From Priceline

Article from Kaiser Foundation news: 

By Phil Galewitz

"The Obama administration is offering a new pricing strategy for doctors and hospitals looking to improve care and lower costs of treating Medicare beneficiaries.

It could be called “Name Your Own Price” — except that’s already taken by a certain online travel website that has a certain Star Trek actor as its pitchman. But the principle is the same.

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a Medicare pilot program that will pay participating hospitals, doctors and other health providers one, “bundled,” payment to treat a patient for a single episode of care. The program starts in 2012. To participate, providers will have to bid less, in total, than what Medicare would pay each provider separately. The traditional Medicare program pays each hospital and doctor a separate fee for its services, which critics say leads to uncoordinated care and incentives to drive up Medicare bills."

Read the full article here

We all know what happens with government programs and low bid.  Is this what you want for your healthcare?   This is more healthcare delivery instead of true health care.

Is the High Cost of Health Care Insurance Killing your Budget

According to the Kaiser Foundation 2010 report, the cost of employer sponsored health care insurance has gone up 46% since 1999 to 2010 .  This means the national average of health insurance is now costing about $13,770 for family coverage per employee per year, as compared to $6438 in 1999.  At the same time the average deductible has gone from $500 to $2500 during the same time.  This means you are paying more and getting less.  Where most insurance companies use to have an 80/20 split after the deductible was met, they are now starting to go to a 70/30 split and in some cases a 60/40 split.  Individual plans have risen at about the same rate.

So what is the answer? 

The first thing you need to do is get out of the health care delivery system.  Health care delivery is what we have now, not health care.  You need to take control of your health care as an individual or as an employee and quite expecting someone else to do it for you.  To do this we must find a way to control the cost as well as control our own health care.  If you are a business owner, and it does not matter what size form the sole proprietor to a corporation you have to take control of cost and health care, and help your employee’s do the same.

The first step to doing this is to become educated about our health care delivery system  and why it has risen in cost at such a high rate.  One place to get a quick education is at Care Liberty.  Dennis Rowley has worked as an insider in the health care insurance industry and has a lot of the answers.   Click here for the video:   Problem with third party payer system

Here is a quick example of how it works.  You go to the doctor whose cash price for a visit is $100, you pay a co-pay (if you have a health care policy),  the doctor files the paper work with your insurance company.  The insurance company then pays the doctor not the cash rate but the PPO Allowable which in this case is $50.  You have already paid $25 so the insurance company pays the other $25.  Lets say your policy cost you $700 a month.  That means you paid $725 for that office visit that month.  The average family goes to the doctor 6 to 8 times a year.  So you are paying $8400 a year for your policy and $200 a year for doctor visits for a total of $8600 for the year.  On average for every dollar you spend on health insurance you get a 25 cent back.  Is that a smart investment?

I don’t think it is.  If you got that kind of return on any investment you would be broke very quickly, because you are losing 75 cents on every dollar you are investing.    

Now what happens at the doctor’s office?  He has to turn your file over to someone in is office who does the paper work to file your claim with the insurance company.  The insurance company has 30 days to respond and usually what happens is they sent a letter back to the doctor office and want to know why you had come to see him.  The insurance company has another 30 days to respond and if the doctor is lucky he may get is $25 from them.  Usually it takes 60 to 120 days before he sees that $25.  He has to pay for is office overhead and expenses so he may see $10 of that $50 as profit before taxes.  Does this tell you why if your lucky you may see him for 5 mins.?  He has to see as many patients in a day as possible to make a living.

I hope you now understand why I say we have a Health Care Delivery System and not Health Care today.  In my next post I will explain how we got to this point.  So please Subscribe via email to my blog so you will get all of my post as I explain more.

Employer Health Benefits Report by the Kaiser Foundation

The following is a summary of the Kaiser Foundation 2010 report that shows the average cost of employer sponsored insurance programs in the US.  for a copy of the complete report click here

The jest of the report is that Health Care Insurance continues to rise at an alarming rate.  Since 2000 the average cost of family coverage have increased 114%.  It also shows a 147% increase in employee contribution. I expect it to rise another 10 to 20% or more in 2011.  This is the problem with the health care delivery.  This is employer sponsored programs, and does not include individual programs.  So what does this tell us, it tell's us we need to find an alternative way to protect our family's.

Another words you are going to be paying an average out of your salary of $3997.00 a year or $333.00 a month so you can pay a co-pay of  $25 to $35 to see a doctor. If you have the Direct Concepts Healthcare program you would pay $88.00 per month plus $60 to $70 for the office visit for a total of $158.00 for that month as compared to paying $368.00 with your insurance plan.  Could you use an extra $200.00 a month of expendable income.  You could take $100.00 of that and put it into a savings account each month and have that for when you do need to go to the doctor.  and still have an extra $100.00 dollars per month in your pocket.

I hope what I having been writing about in my blog these last few week is starting to make sense to everyone.  Sometimes I feel like John the Baptist felt, a voice crying out in the wilderness.  But I am so passionate about this that I will keep truing to help people understand what is going on with our health care in this Country.

HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS AND WORKER CONTRIBUTIONS
The average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2010 are $5,049 for single coverage and $13,770 for family coverage. Compared to 2009, premiums for single coverage are 5% higher ($4,824) and premiums for family coverage are 3% higher ($13,375). Since 2000, average premiums for family coverage have increased 114% (Exhibit A). Average premiums for family coverage are lower for workers in small firms (3–199 workers) than for workers in large firms (200 or more workers) ($13,250 vs. $14,038). Average premiums for high-deductible health plans with a savings option (HDHP/SOs) are lower than the overall average for all plan types for both single and family coverage (Exhibit B).
For PPOs, the most common plan type, the average family premium topped $14,000 annually in 2010.
As a result of factors such as benefit differences and geographical cost differences, there is significant variation around the average annual premium. Twenty percent of covered workers are in plans with an annual total premium for family coverage of at least $16,524 (120% of the average premium), while 19% of covered workers are in plans where the family premium is less than $11,016 (80% of the average premium) (Exhibit C).
In 2010, covered workers contributed a greater share of the total premium, a notable change from the steady share workers have paid on average over the last decade. Covered workers on average contribute 19% of the total premium for single coverage (up from 17% in 2009) and 30% for family coverage (up from 27% in 2009). As with total premiums, the premium shares contributed by workers vary considerably around these averages. For single coverage, 28% of workers pay more than 25% of the total premium while 16% make no contribution.
Fifty-one percent of workers with family coverage pay more than 25% of the total premium; only 5% make no contribution (Exhibit D).
 
Looking at dollar amounts, the average annual worker contributions are $899 for single coverage and $3,997 for family coverage, up from $779 and $3,515 respectively in 2009.

2. Workers in small firms (3–199 workers) contribute about the same amount for single coverage as workers in large firms (200 or more workers) ($865 vs. $917), but they contribute significantly more for family coverage ($4,665 vs. $3,652).