How Group Health Insurance And Healthy Employee Incentives Work Hand-In-Hand

You can completely change the culture of your work environment and how your employees feel and perform by both offering group health insurance and implementing healthy employee incentives.

Now, before you start calculating how much each is going to cost you, hear us out.

Healthy employee incentives reward employees for making positive steps towards a healthier lifestyle, and group health insurance can save employees and employers money by buying health coverage in bulk. Providing these two things makes your company a more attractive place to work, and can increase the happiness of your employees.

What incentives are usually offered?

Some companies offer employees incentives for different, positive steps to a healthier lifestyle. For instance, companies might reward an employee who quits smoking by offering to pay for their Nicorette gum or nicotine patches that help them stay away from cigarettes. It can even be things as small as offering tickets to local events for employees who quit smoking.

Another incentive might be a company that rewards weight loss. They may help pay for a portion of a person’s diet plan or gym membership, as long as it helps them lose weight or keep weight down that they have already lose.

Why incentives?

You may be wondering, why incentives? Incentives for healthy progress from employees often requires the employer to pay out to the employee—in the form of whatever the decided incentive is—thus resulting in less money for the company.

The reality, though, can be the opposite. Rewarding healthier employees can make money for companies in a few ways.

The first way is through healthier lifestyles in general. When employees are living as healthy as possible, they are at less of a risk for hospital visits that may keep them out of work. This results to less missed time, and more money for the company because of that.

Additionally, if you are required to help pay for any of the medical bills, you will lose money there. With fewer hospital visits, there will be less missed time from employees and less money spent to help employees cover medical bills.

So what about group health insurance?

Group health care is just like individual health care, except it’s purchased as a lump for several people. You can speak to employees and figure out what coverage they need, for how many people in their family, and then find a plan that fits the vast majority of people.

While some believe that group health insurance is not good because there’s always going to be someone who is unhappy with the plan, that is often not the case because of the huge amount of plans that are currently available in the health care industry.

The concept of group-purchased health care saving you money is just like a store buying product to put on the shelves. If you go to the grocery store to buy just a single box of cereal, you may have to pay $3. The grocery store, on the other hand, can purchase the box of cereal for $1 because they buy so many boxes of cereal at the same time. The law of wholesale works in the health care industry as well. If you’re buying health care for a lot of employees, it can be cheaper than if they had to purchase it themselves.

Are there any other benefits?

There are other benefits to offering group health insurance. It requires less understanding of several different plans, so when your employees come to you with questions on their health care, you don’t have to dig around finding out which plan they have in order to help them solve their issue.

Again, the happier employee comes into play as well. Offering group insurance instead of making your employees go out and get their own insurance makes them happier, and makes it easier on them to get health care. Group insurance is often split between the company and the employee, and the employee often has to pitch in a minimum percentage for them and their family to be covered.

If you need help starting a health incentive program for your employees, or finding a group health insurance plan, contact us today! It could save you money, and make your employees much happier to work for you in the long run.