The Importance of Providing High Quality Group Vision Insurance for Your Employees

Many people don’t think vision impairment is a major disability, but it’s one of the top ten causes of disabilities in the United States. What’s more, 63 percent or more of American adults are wearing glasses or contact lenses. If you’re a small business owner and not providing your employees with high-quality group vision insurance, here’s why it’s important, along with a few considerations and warnings.

What Do You Mean by Group Vision Insurance?

Vision insurance is the term that’s used for describing health and wellness insurance plans that are intended to reduce the amount of money people must pay for routine eye exams (preventive eye care), besides prescription eyewear, such as eyeglasses and contact lenses. Furthermore, there are some vision plans offering discounts on LASIK, PRK and other types of elective vision correction procedures.

What Are the Basic Advantages of Offering High-Quality Vision Insurance?

Although vision insurance typically isn’t a requirement for small business owners, there are still several reasons for including it in employee benefit packages. In fact, many employees appreciate the vision and dental benefits even more than getting increases in salary.

• When you offer high-quality group vision insurance to your workers, you help in boosting company morale.
• It can be easier to not only hire the best employees for your small business but to also keep your top workers.
• When their eye health is good, employees are more likely to work harder and longer so that your company continues to prosper and grow.
• You can bundle vision insurance with health and dental coverage. This can result in lower prices, which saves money for your employees.

What Are the Types of Group Vision Insurance Plans?

The two main types of group vision plans include:

• A vision benefits package—This group vision plan offers vision care that’s paid for by either an annual membership fee (that’s deductible each year for each member, along with co-payments for services) or an annual premium.
• A vision discount plan—With this plan, vision care is provided at a fixed rate that’s reduced once members pay for a yearly premium or membership fee and deductible.
• With both these types of plans, members receive basic coverage, which includes comprehensive eye exams, besides a pair of eyeglasses or contact lenses.
• These plans both allow for out-of-network eye care services. This entails people paying a provider in full at the time of their appointments and getting reimbursed later by their insurance company for part of the cost. 

Considerations and Warnings 

• Before buying a vision insurance group plan, make sure you thoroughly read all the terms of the policy and understand what you’re purchasing. For example, know the benefits and costs for whatever plan or plans you considering buying.
• In most cases, employees pay for their group vision insurance via FSAs (flexible spending accounts) or payroll deductions.
• Also known as a “cafeteria plan”, an FSA is a plan that lets employees use their pre-tax money for buying vision insurance or other health benefits they choose. Because the policy is paid for with income that’s been designated for health expenses and isn’t taxed, it saves you money.
• Eye problems are expensive, costing our country $68 billion each year in healthcare expenses.
• Your overall health can suffer because of vision problems.
• Regardless of their age group, people need to have regular, annual eye exams or sometimes get them even more frequently.
• Eye health is just as important as the physical health or dental health of your employees.
• A recent study, involving American adults (40-65 years old), showed that vision insurance improved the eye health of people who had this coverage. The group with vision insurance had more eye exams and claimed that they didn’t have problems reading printed materials, while the group without vision insurance did report visual difficulties.
• To secure group vision insurance, you’ll need to provide documented evidence that your business is legitimate and that you have at least another full-time employee, in addition to yourself.

Questions? For all your questions regarding insurance, visit the insurance professionals at InsureYourCompany.com. We mainly focus on single-person LLCs in tech and small New Jersey businesses, even though we do work with a wide variety of businesses. Please contact us.