Providing small business medical coverage is often seen as a pipe-dream. Simply meeting payroll is often difficult for small business owners. How can they be expected to offer an array of employee benefits such as small business medical insurance, particularly given the spiraling costs of these plans? While the needs for a healthy and productive workforce are the same whether a business is large or small, the owners of small businesses typically do not have enough employees to make these types of group benefit plans affordable.

Small Business Medical Insurance Coverage Benefits Both Employers and Employees

Without a doubt, small business medical coverage can be expensive. Nonetheless, this expense comes with benefits to both the small business owner and his or her employees. When employees and their families are healthy, the number of missed days of work declines, job satisfaction improves, and as a result, productivity increases. Small business medical insurance, therefore, is an investment that can pay off with a more productive workforce, no different from investing in capital improvements or employee training. Large employers have long acknowledged the importance of providing their employees with medical coverage, and the benefits are the same for smaller enterprises. The difficulty for small business owners is finding affordable coverage that does not jeopardize the fiscal stability and future growth of the company.

Options for Locating Affordable Small Business Medical Insurance

Group insurance plans of any kind, including group medical insurance, are priced according to the size of the group; the larger the group, the lower the premiums. This is why the same kind of plan can be affordable on a per-employee basis for a large employer, but out of reach of the small business owner. However, there are options for finding small business medical insurance plans that do not break the bank. Health cooperatives are a growing trend that permits the pooling of resources to bring group purchasing power to the cooperative's members. Similarly, health insurance exchanges bring individuals and small businesses together to purchase plans on a group basis. Another alternative can be high deductible or limited benefit plans. Although not the most comprehensive in small business medical insurance, these plans can at least provide emergency and catastrophic coverage.

Under the recent health insurance reform law, officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, employer shared responsibility for providing medical insurance to employees will be required for large employers, but small businesses with fewer than 25 employees will be exempt. However, the law will encourage small business medical coverage through the expansion of health cooperatives and insurance exchanges. For those employers that still choose not to offer small business medical insurance, their employees may be eligible for affordability credits under the law. These credits will assist individuals in securing affordable medical insurance through the insurance exchanges. Finding a way to offer small business medical coverage for employees may seem like a daunting task, but as the new law unfolds over the next several years, the available options will continue to expand.