Traditionally, businesses looking for alternatives in health plan offerings faced a choice between conventional fully-funded plans and self-insured plans. If you’ve been searching for a way to limit your health plan costs but balked at the risks of a self-funded plan, you might want to consider a partially self-funded health plan. These plans borrow elements from both fully-funded and self-funded plans and offer a great stepping stone in the direction of self-funding.

Partially self-funded plans allow you to explore self-funding, lower your health plan costs and still provide high-quality benefits to your employees in the process.

Let’s take a look at partially self-funded plans, how they work, and how they can help your company save on health plan costs.

After discussing the fully insured model for health benefits in our first blog post of the series, you might want to learn more about some of the alternatives we discussed there, including level-funded insurance plans.

Is a level-funded plan right for your small-to-medium-sized business? Business leaders across all industries and sectors continually ask themselves the same question, wondering how to best serve their employees while cutting costs.

Let’s continue our series by taking a closer look at level-funded plans and what they can do for your organization and employees.

When companies try to save money, they typically look at their most significant expenses to see if they can trim them down.

Health insurance is likely one of the highest line items in your budget, whether you're a small or large business owner. Your payroll is probably higher, and depending on the type of company you have, equipment and maintenance might be more costly, but employee benefits are always up there.

And these costs continue to grow every year! According to projections by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, national health spending will increase by 5.5% per year until 2027.

So how can companies limit the ever-increasing costs of health insurance? Enter level-funding.

Once upon a time, perhaps a decade or so ago, benefits were a somewhat static monolith for businesses. Organizations instructed their HR teams and benefits managers to find the best health insurance plan for their employees across the board.

The options have grown leaps and bounds for employers to offer a spectrum of health insurance opportunities for their valued employees.

If you’ve ever heard employees complain about the high out-of-pocket costs of certain medical procedures or wondered how to keep their health plan costs from spiraling, you may have considered an alternative to traditional health plan offerings. Faced with inflated health plan costs, many companies are turning to an emerging alternative to traditional health plans, known as reference based pricing. If you want to manage healthcare costs while maintaining the same level of care and coverage for employees, it may be time to consider implementing a reference based pricing model.

Have you ever created an annual stewardship report? Are you familiar with them and all they can do to enhance your business and inspire your employees, organization, clients, and stakeholders?

An annual stewardship report serves as a tool to provide transparency in your operations to anyone who has a vested interest in your business, including the public. Businesses of all types and in all industries increasingly use annual stewardship reports to foster confidence, community engagement, and increased growth, socially and financially.

If you’re ready to start producing an annual stewardship report to provide transparency in your approach to benefits, keep reading to learn more.

Over the past decade, employees’ work desires and motivations have remained in a state of flux. Perhaps it is the changing of the guard in four parts with the four co-existing generations in the workplace at one time. The unique attitudes from Baby Boomers and Generation X to Millennials and Generation Z are bound to have an impact on the workforce since the world has changed drastically over the past 50 years.

Many employees have said that they would choose to accept a lower-paying salary for better benefits, especially when considering health care and financial (e.g., 401(k)) benefits. As a result, having a competitive benefits program can make a huge difference when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent. Unfortunately, many employers aren’t sure where their benefits align when compared to their competitors or the industry as a whole.

Your board of directors and officers are an important aspect of your organization. So, what happens when they face lawsuits related to things like breach of fiduciary duty, misrepresentations of company assets, or misuse of business funds?

It can cause a big dent in their financial stability and possibly the financial stability of the company. Directors and officers insurance is coverage that helps to protect your company and board of directors and officers if such lawsuits occur.

Retirement planning is an essential part of our sense of stability and safety for the future. Employees across all generations consider retirement saving benefits from their employer important.

According to the 19th Annual TransAmerica Center for Retirement Study report, 78% of Baby Boomers and 77% of Gen X workers participate in a company-sponsored 401(k) or similar plan, and 21% of millennials are engaged in the retirement savings topic. Gen Z also ranked 401(k) benefits as one of the top five employer benefits in the What the Class of 2019 Wants. And nearly 68% of surveyed students thought 401(k) employer matching contributions were important in the NACE Class of 2017 Student Survey. Also, in the 2018 American Institute of CPAs survey of 547 recent college grads and college seniors, 36% ranked 401(k) with a company match in the top three workplace benefits.