- To
- The person deciding what this business offers its people
- Subject
- A benefit that gets used in months when nobody is ill
Most benefits are insurance against something rare. This one is a discount on something ordinary.
That difference decides whether people notice it. A policy that pays out once in five years is invisible for the other four; a card that takes money off a prescription every month is not.
Offering nothing is itself a message
Plenty of small businesses cannot carry group health cover, and there is no shame in that — the numbers are the numbers. But the gap gets read as a decision even when it was never made as one.
A membership program is not a substitute for cover and should never be sold as one. What it is, is something rather than nothing, at a price a small business can actually sustain month after month without revisiting the decision every quarter.
Against a traditional plan
Set side by side, the two things behave differently in almost every respect that matters administratively.
To be explicit, because it matters: this is not insurance and does not replace it. If you can offer cover, offer cover. This is for the case where the alternative on the table is nothing.
Sized to your business, not to a package
There is no bronze-silver-gold ladder for employers and no minimum headcount that unlocks a better rate. What there is, is a conversation about how many people you have and which of the seventeen categories they would actually use.
Often the strongest case, because the per-person decision is the same one a household makes and the arithmetic is easy to check.
Where turnover makes annual enrollment cycles painful, month-to-month with no waiting period does the work.
As the layer that handles the deductible and the categories a plan leaves out, rather than as a replacement for it.
What your people would actually be given
The same seventeen categories a household gets, at the same negotiated rates — prescriptions at 10–85%, lab testing at 10–80%, imaging at 40–75%, dental at 15–50%, vision at 10–60%, and the rest.
Behind those numbers are the networks: 60,000 pharmacies, 262,000 dental providers, 20,000 vision providers and 1,500 labs. National, so it works wherever your people live rather than only near the office.
The program is not available in Utah, Iowa or Washington, and lab testing is excluded in Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. If your workforce sits in those states, that is worth knowing before any conversation goes further.
Start by pricing it for the people you actually have, in the states they actually live in. If the categories your workforce uses do not justify it, that is a legitimate outcome and you will be told so — the same way a household is told so.