Generally speaking, the purpose of an employer group health insurance plan is to spread the risk of health claims around to a wider pool of people. This works great with large employers, but with small employers (say, under 50, though this is more true the smaller you get), this will help some people (ie those with health conditions) and hurt some people (those who are healthy). An insurance company will underwrite the group as a whole, and if they are assigned a higher premium due to risk factors, that will hit everyone on the plan.
Let’s use a hypothetical example: If you work for a company with 10 employees, and one of them is recovering from cancer, two are diabetics, and a couple other folks are on various anti-depressants or thyroid medications (all common issues), you’re going to wind up paying a lot more for your coverage because of them. That’s just the way it is.
Typically, with small employer, the employer will pay 50% or so of the employee’s premium, but they often don’t contribute at all towards dependent coverage. (Obviously this will vary, but we’d call this the norm.) So in many small employer situations, if your family is healthy, you’d be better served to get them an individual health insurance plan than rather than pay the elevated premiums to have them on the group plan.
Besides, individual plans are almost always cheaper anyway (at least in the states we serve), because the insurance company can do more underwriting, can decline people, and can exclude conditions they don’t want to cover. People get mad about that stuff, but the pricing is the upside. Again, that’s just the way it is (for now… but not for long per the legislation).
If you want to see what we mean… give us a call or simply run a few sample individual health insurance quotes on our online “quote engine.” to compare the options with what you’re paying to cover your family on your employer’s health insurance plan. We invite you contact us to talk about this more!