Group Health Insurance

For today's business owner, the cost of group health insurance is certainly one of the highest, if not the highest, item on his profit and loss statement. Those costs are not going down. They have been escalating way beyond the rate of inflation for many years now. We at Whitford Insurance Network (WIN) offer group health insurance, we can provide that benefit with no problem at all. In fact, along with the group health insurance we provide many group benefits: group life insurance, group short-term disability and group long-term disability. We provide all of those products. When it comes to the group health product specifically, we always want to talk to the employer/business owner about the things that drive up the cost. The first important concept to deal with is educating the business owner. You've got to stop treating the group health product as a maintenance plan, and start treating it as what it really is: insurance against a catastrophe. The way to do that is to increase your deductibles, increase your co-pays and finally, the hardest medicine for business owners, have the employees contribute to the cost of the benefit. There is no other way to control it. Of course, the use of the benefit does impact the cost, along with the demographics of your own group (the younger the better.) The most important factor, though, is in fact deductibles, co-pays and employee contributions. We also have the ability to make those employee contributions paid by pre-tax dollars. We have the ability to provide health savings accounts. We have the ability to provide HRA's (Health Insurance Reimbursement Accounts.) So, we have all of these tools. We feel strongly that WIN has the skills to provide a very competitive group health plan to help a business owner get the cost of that insurance under control.