Hourly Indexed Limited Benefit Health Plans
Businesses with part-time, hourly, temporary and seasonal employees that budget on a cost-per-hour basis find offering health insurance a challenge.
WHY?
Plans are generally designed for salaried, full-time employees
You may end up paying more in benefits, proportionately, for part-time, hourly, temporary and seasonal employees, if you are able to offer them benefits at all.
Time-consuming administration
With monthly plans, you may have to add to, and subtract from, a monthly list bill whenever there is a new hire or terminated employee. Additionally, when an employee terminates mid-month, you may have to administer premium refunds.
It may be difficult to identify an actual cost-per-hour for benefits
Most plans use a monthly premium rate. Trying to determine exactly how much per hour your business is spending, or can spend, on benefits may be difficult.
- You want a plan that works for your hourly-based business.
- You need a plan that can be offered to all your employees.
- You have to know exactly how much you’ll be paying for benefits.
An hourly plan structure offers:
Fixed premium costs per hour
With an hourly premium rate, you’re only paying premium for the number of hours an employee works each month. This can save you significant dollars, especially if you have employees whose hours fluctuate from month to month.
The charts below illustrate the premium cost per hour for an employer with a $1 per hour plan versus a $100 per month plan. As you can see, when employee hours are low, the cost per hour rises considerably for those covered under the monthly plan structures.
Hourly plans start at $0.45/hour and go up to nearly $4/hour. America Protect® can help design a plan that fits your budget.
Incentive for employees to work more hours
Hourly plans reward employees as they work more hours. The three levels of benefits are structured so that, as employees work more hours, their coverage increases.
Hourly plans can be a strong incentive for employees to take on more hours each month. Having fewer employees working more hours can reduce overhead and help your business run more efficiently.
Flexibility
Hourly plans can be designed to fit your specific needs. If you want an hourly plan that costs $0.85 per hour, then we can design a plan that costs $0.85 per hour.
Hourly plans start at $0.45 per hour and go up to nearly $4 per hour. If you only want certain benefits included, we can design a plan that features the benefits you want.
If you only have a certain number of dollars to spend on benefits each month, but want to be able to pay for all your employees, consider a core buy-up plan. This design builds off a basic hourly plan design but offers three additional levels of benefits. You pay 100 percent of the premium for the core plan and offer this to all your eligible employees. If employees want to increase coverage, they can do so by:
- Working more hours to increase their coverage.
- Purchasing a buy-up option through payroll deduction.
Buy-ups offer higher amounts of coverage and/or additional benefits. - Doing a combination of 1 and 2.
Easy administration
With an Hourly Indexed Plan, you only report and pay for the actual number of hours employees work each month. Each month, you’ll simply send a file with the number of hours for each employee along with premium. You’re only recording the actual hours worked so there’s no adding or removing employees from a monthly list bill.
