5 Tips to Reduce Health Insurance Costs

Health insurance premiums are on the rise. Many business owners are considering asking their employees to take on a larger financial burden or cutting benefits entirely. Do you feel like health insurance for your business is taking a piece out of your revenue? It may seem like that, but benefits often attract and retain better employees, and satisfied and healthy employees are more likely to help your business grow. Here are some tips and hints that could reduce your health insurance costs.

5 Tips to Help Reduce Health Insurance Costs

1. Improved Safety Incentives: Providing health insurance benefits are important for employee retention and happiness, and since company success rests on the performance of employees, it’s important to keep them happy and healthy! Safety incentive programs, which reward employees for meeting milestones are helping employees set, meet and exceed goals. And they are helping companies attract and retain valuable talent. And all this while keeping them from injury, which is bad for them and costly for the company.

2. Effective Communication: Open communication is important. If your employees feel like you’re confiding in them and are open to their suggestions (as long as they’re reasonable), they will be more apt to stay and produce quality work. Furthermore, if you must reduce your coverage to save money, a policy of open communication and reasoning is a wise path to take. Indirectly, effective communication could save you more than almost any other tip we throw your way.

3. Wellness Programs: Similar to safety incentive programs, wellness programs run the scope from offering employees free gym memberships to providing healthy snacks in the company kitchen and health screenings that can result in lower insurance payments for employees. This works well for office jobs that are less physically hazardous and more likely to affect wellness if employees aren’t active.

4. Health Savings Accounts: Health savings accounts are a popular option for small business owners. These tax-exempt accounts, which are used to pay for certain medical expenses, could reduce your business’ health insurance costs while giving your employees tax breaks.

5. Keep Searching: There isn’t only one health insurance policy out there. If you’re unsatisfied with your options, shopping around for different providers could reduce your small business health insurance costs by finding at better offer. Ask other entrepreneurs and business owners what they pay for health insurance, and don’t discount insurance agents. They will charge fees, but you’ll save time and they can investigate health insurance plans for you, helping you find the best option available.

Take Care of Your Employees and They’ll Take Care of You

Whatever your solution might be, we recommend always taking care of your employees and finding ways of offering benefits. After all, you wouldn’t be a business without them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take a chunk out of your spending with the right amount of planning and strategy.