New small business health insurance website: An incredibly easy site that works for you
By Susan Solovic, THE Small Business Expert
Here are some actual headlines I saw today when I was researching small business health insurance:
- Forbes: The Cost Of Health Insurance Is A Big Problem For Small Business
- Huffington Post: The Small Business Health Insurance Roller Coaster – What is Next?
- New York Post: ObamaCare just killed my health insurance – again
I doubt that any of these shock you. For small business owners, navigating the industry to find affordable health insurance has been a major headache for as long as most people can remember.
And to be frank, despite good intentions, the Affordable Care Act has, in many ways, made the situation more complicated. Even Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton – a loyal Democrat – just said that The Affordable Care Act is “no longer affordable.”
Small biz health and wellness
The other part of this issue is that it’s wise for small business owners to encourage employee health and wellness. Healthy employees take fewer sick days and are more productive. This means that you aren’t having people constantly covering for one another trying to get two jobs done during the work day.
There’s one more piece of this picture that I need to mention: health insurance is a highly desirable benefit that creates loyalty and helps you recruit and keep high-performing talented professionals.
Not all the news about small business health insurance is bad. UnitedHealthcare recently launched a website expressly for the purpose of helping small business owners and their employees get affordable health insurance easily and quickly. It’s great to see someone bringing the power and convenience of an online shopping experience to the small business health insurance market and doing it right.
Convenient health insurance site
Let me explain what I mean by “doing it right.” I went to the new website, entered my zip code, and the number of employees in my business and immediately had a screen in front of me spelling out the estimated costs for me and my employees for 12 different plans.
That’s great, but there’s one little detail that really won me over: They didn’t require me to create an account to get the small business health insurance information I wanted! I do not like commerce websites that promise free information and then make you give them your name, email address, phone number, and in many cases even a credit card number before they will give you the “free” information.
In other words, when you head over to the UnitedHealthcare small business health insurance store, you will get the most important information you need in under a minute without having to cough up any personal or business information.
Other “doing it right” details:
- Easy navigation. You can get back to previous screens to change entries with a single click.
- Flexible options. If you want to add additional plans to give employees more choices, you can do this later; you don’t have to make every decision up front.
- Information upload. You can upload employee information from Xero, QuickBooks, or Excel files.
By the way, every small business owner will have at least two plans to choose from, and many will have 27 plans. As I said above, I was presented with 12 plans.
Control health insurance costs
The bottom line with health insurance is, literally, the bottom line: costs. And this is true for you as a small business owner as well as true for your employees. The UnitedHealthcare small business site gives you and your employees extremely good control over costs. You can set your budget and then all employee costs will be built around what you have committed to pay. So if an employee wants the most expensive plan, it won’t cost you more.
Being able to easily control your costs is certainly a feature every small business owner will appreciate. Perhaps the biggest problem plaguing health insurance in recent years has been the uncertainty of costs. The tools available on the UnitedHealthcare small business site go a long way toward solving the uncertainty problem.
Before I finish this, let me give you the “big picture” of the process when you decide to explore your options at this website:
- Compare multiple plans with costs based on the location of your small business and how many employees you have, (2- 50)
- Select one or more plans,
- Input employee sex, age, and dependent coverage (if any) to get the real “out-the-door” pricing,
- Set your budget and balance employer-employee costs, and
- Buy the plan(s).
Even the small business owner who never seems to have enough hours in the day will discover that the online system UnitedHealthcare has put together is extremely fast and efficient.
Editor’s note: This post is sponsored by United Health Care. All thoughts and opinions are strictly my own.