Healthcare Benefits – Requirement to be a Choose People Company?

As of late, I have had many people ask, “Do potential Choose People companies have to provide health care to be eligible?”

Drum roll please….

No.

No?  Is often the response I receive.  No.  And there are several reasons why health care benefits are NOT a requirement for becoming a Choose People company.

My personal belief is that everyone should have access to universal healthcare AND it is unreasonable to have businesses be the bearers of this cost.  Choose People is pro-employees and pro-business as they truly go hand and hand.

As the business owner of Exodus Moving & Storage I researched health care a multitude of times for my employees, and found it to be out of our reach.  It killed me not to be able to provide health insurance.  (The average profit margin for a moving company our size is 2.2% – without health insurance as an expense.)

Here’s the irony.  I could find relatively reasonable plans for $250/month per employee as most of my employees are young, smoking males.  In order to afford this insurance, my employees would have had to pay half of the cost which was not something they were excited about.  The irony was that they could get the EXACT SAME coverage as individuals for $100/month.  So instead of providing health care insurance, we increased most of the wages by $1/hour.  And the choice would remain in the hands of the employees.

The most difficult part as a business owner is that I knew that if I chose to bring on health insurance as a benefit, that the following year, my rates would increase, significantly.  And each year after that.  Health care insurance is known for bringing you on at a decent rate and then dramatically increasing rates each year – this happens to individuals as well.  And nothing is worse for employee morale than giving a benefit and then taking it away.

There are many companies who do not offer health care insurance who are worthy of the Choose People certification which measures if their employees feel good about coming to work.  Now if employees are NOT happy about coming to work BECAUSE they do not have health insurance, the certification process will measure this concern and it will affect the participating company’s outcome.

I would rather there be jobs available at companies where people feel good about coming to work, then a lack of jobs at good companies who went out of business due in part to their healthcare insurance expenses simply being too high.

And while I don’t believe that companies should bear this burden, I truly commend those companies who have been able to and have chosen to make sure that their employees have access to health care.