Ask HN: How do I get health insurance for my employees?

8 points·pilom··4 comments

I'm at the point where my bootstrapped business is getting profitable enough for me to start looking into getting health insurance for me and another co-founder and whoever we bring in. Where should I start looking?

View on HN

You will most likely want to go through a broker. However keep in mind that with just two people it can be very expensive. There are PEOs which run payroll and provide benefits and HR. The big ones are administaff and ADP total source. administaff I think has a min of 6 employees (or something like that) Im not sure if ADP has a minimum.

Their fees typically run 3% of payroll, but you will save that by being in a much larger risk pool.

there are many smaller PEOs which would cost less or require fewer employees so just search for PEO

With two or three people,there is little point in trying to establish a group policy. As a place to start, the BC/BS website for your state will probably provide you with online quotes for individual plans for each of you.

The big questions: how much coverage is your company going to provide for employees, how do you handle vast discrepancies between the costs for individual employees, and how do you handle dependent coverage.

I use Paychex to process my payroll and they offer a health insurance service which connected me with Blue Cross Blue Shield, this has worked out perfectly for us.

Shockingly, there's a useful government web site that can help a lot http://www.healthcare.gov/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com