I actually really rather prefer buying my own insurance, and by that I mean I buy only the minimum required by law. Insurance companies design their policies to get more out of you then you get out of them, and they've gotten very good at figuring out ways to deny benefits to people.<p>Just give me the money in my paycheck and let me do with it as I see fit. The money I would spend on insurance I put into a personal savings account. I insure myself.<p>I spent $1200 <i>total</i> on health care costs in the last 3 years. Now that Obamacare requires I buy insurance or else get hit with a penalty, I'm going to be spending a lot more than that every year.<p>Why should it be cheaper to have group policies through employers? The entire freaking point of the insurance company is that they are pooling money from a bunch of people over time in the form of premiums to be able to distribute to a minority who need it in emergencies. It's already a paramutual arrangement, why do we have to obfuscate it with employer group policies?<p>Insurance, at least as it is done in the US, is a scam. It is an oligarchy designed to keep medical services prices high so they can justify outlandish premiums as merely just a small percentage margin.
> And one of the things my dad brought up with me is just how important it is to have a good long term disability insurance plan in place. I had never actually heard about it. Long term disability is a policy that can pay out 60% of your salary for the rest of your life if you have an occupation-ending injury.<p>This is surprising to me. I'm Canadian and I've worked my whole life here so maybe this is one of those Canadian vs US things, but I've never had a job that didn't have long term disability as part of its offering.<p>Most pay the standard 60% of your pay for the rest of your life if you are unable to work at that job any more.<p>As someone with a family, I'd say its probably the most important form of insurance to have, if you have someone else to take care of your kids in the event of both parents dieing.
AFAIK there are two common types of long-term disability policy:<p>1. You are covered if you can't do your current job.
2. You are covered if you can't do any job.<p>Every employer who has ever offered me this benefit offered the second version, which is great, but it certainly won't help replace my current income if I can't perform the job I have now.
Dental coverage is a scam. I priced dental insurance for my startups for three years. The only plans available to companies with less than 50 employees have benefit caps that were less than the cost of the yearly premiums! You get "free" cleanings and x-rays but it still makes much, much, much more sense to take the cost of the premium and put it in a health savings account for your employee to spend on dental care (or any other qualified medical expense).
It just occurred to me that the more benefits jobs provide, the more dependent on those jobs people become, and the harder they fall when they lose those jobs.<p>This is NOT an argument against providing benefits, of course. But it does create a weird dynamic.
We actually put Ltd in place this year. For our company (11 employees, almost everyone in their 30s) it added like $10 a month to our policy. We also pay 100 percent of the health care and it's our #1 expense after labor.
Man, this really brings back bad memories of wrestling with health insurance, dental insurance, and the like in my previous USA startup. Now I'm in the UK and we don't have to worry about it!
Seems like many otherwise smart people think in terms of "how likely am I to need this?". Insurance should be thought of in terms of "how screwed would I or my family be if...?". If somebody depends upon your income, get life insurance and long term disability. If <i>you</i> depend on your income, get long term disability. Everyone except for billionaires needs major medical insurance (USA). And stop insuring things that you can afford to replace (warranties generally).
It baffles me how few people have disability insurance. What would you do if injured your hands and could never type again? What would your family do? Everyone should have disability insurance -- it should be a fundamental part of your financial life.
I just left an employer who had 100% salary continuance insurance in place.<p>Maybe mine is the minority view, but I found it a horrendous waste. When I left the employer it offered to have my portion of the policy transferred to me personally so that I could "continue to enjoy the benefits". I didn't even bother responding (despite leaving on otherwise very good terms).<p>While I work, I expect to be remunerated. But I don't allow myself the hubris to expect that remuneration should continue in perpetuity. If I decide not to work, or am unable to work, I would prefer to adjust my circumstances to accommodate that fact, rather than continue to pretend otherwise.
The difference in cost of benefits such as health, eye, dental, life and disability insurance, particularly if dependents are included can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars a year more for one employee than for another.<p>Do you want to haphazardly compensate your employees like that, without it even being bargained for during the hiring process? Wouldn't it be better to negotiate a total compensation number instead? You could potentially be looking at a whole different class of employees for the same total money.<p>Though maybe the (irrational) bad will generated would wipe out the gains.
This is one area where health care insurance costs are pretty affordable. We are a web design company in the sunny state of Florida, so these are our rates based on 10 to 20 employees.<p>From my understanding the larger you are, the cheaper the rates. Since the article /comments asked for typical rates, here is where we are at to compare. Not sure how many employees 42floors.com has, but $2,500 per year would probably be around 5 to 10 employees if they were all male.<p>STD/LTD Group Policies - Our rates are typically $21 to $60 per male employee and $71 to $150 per female employee per month. So it could add about $250 to $1,800 per employee depending on their salary and gender.<p>Maternity Leave - The good news is that this covers maternity leave of 3 months for our lady employees. This is a nice benefit to offer. It also explains the higher rates based on gender.<p>Health Care Coverage - Most group health insurance policies are super high in monthly premiums ($200 to $600 per month for individuals and $1,000 to $1,500 for family coverage). We cover this in full right now for individuals. But it is a huge ongoing cost, especially as everyone gets older and starts families. STD/LTD policies are very cheap by comparison (obviously geared towards a different life event).<p>Other options - It would probably be cheaper if you just bought long-term, if the concern is catastrophic coverage. But we cover short term too and that increases the rates.
My aunt used to work at a school that did not have this policy in place. The principle had a debilitating head injury that put her in a coma; she is now unfit to work for the rest of her life. It was tremendously sad for everyone involved, but it has also severely strained the school financially. Under Massachusetts law, the school is required to pay a large percentage of her original salary now that she is disabled. Had they taken out an LTD insurance policy this wouldn't have been a problem.
Important note:<p>If the company pays for your disability with pre-tax dollars, your disability payments are taxed as income.<p>If you pay for your disability with after-tax dollars, you are not taxed on the income.<p>Keep this in mind when designing the plan. If taxing the employees on their disability benefits makes the benefits tax-free, you should give your employees that option.
Comparing this with my French life is astonishing.<p>I can go in and out of hospitals/any doctor for almost free, ambulance ride included if necessary. For ~30€ monthly above the basic care (paid by employers).
I don't recall ever worrying about money when it comes to health. What you have in the US is archaic.
I'm not completely following this whole healthcare reform. I do know that it's more cost effective for employeers of small businesses to use a SHOP exchange: <a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/what-is-the-shop-marketplace/" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthcare.gov/what-is-the-shop-marketplace/</a><p>According to my current employeer they wont be able to purchase 100% coverage using the health exchange. So personally this is going to start costing me significantly more...<p>Edit:Apparently - our benefits consultant commented that it would be cheaper for individuals to purchase their own health insurance. I guess I will deal with that when the time comes.
One thing not mentioned here is the waiting period. I.e. after you are injured and stop working, you are typically required to use up all of your sick/vacation time, and/or wait for 180 days until you can receive benefits.<p>I've worked for companies that offer short-term disability insurance -- which will cover the gap -- but this is less common than LTD.<p>This is why it's important to have an emergency fund to cover your living expenses for at least the waiting period. Otherwise you could be looking at eviction before the money from your disability insurance comes in.
At Huddle, in the UK, we don't even need this (NHS. No, I don't want to argue about this.) but we have both health insurance and death-in-service coverage for families.<p>It's made a big difference to our general peace-of-mind, and there are a bunch of other things that go along with it to encourage fitness. We're all a <i>lot</i> fitter than we were before, and since the team is more family-oriented than we were when the company started, death-in-service coverage is very welcome.
The obvious question is how is "occupation-ending" defined, in particular for knowledge workers who could quite possibly continue working with even severe physical disabilities?
Given the cost and the impact upon what would be a very bad disaster, this indeed makes so much sense and also seems cheap in comparision to other benifits a company pays out for.<p>Few questions though on these types of policy:<p><pre><code> 1) What limitations are needed to be observed - must a company have a defined standard of health and safty and as such a defined quantifiable level of risk.
2) Are such policys only limited to accidents or directly measurable incidents that casue a disability in an employee or are outside area's like a bad skiing accident also covered. The whole area of say parkinsons and somebody who has a family history of it would that also be covered as that would be a disability reducing career situation.
3) The employers impact - loosing an employee is very costly and some more than others but whoever you lose will be a impact that is fiscaly measurable from cost of finding replacement and training time invested, down to extra overtime upon the others to pick up the slack until somebody else is upto speed. This is factoring in every thing is documented to the if I fall under a bus will my colleges be able to pick up the slack. So with that a little bit extra on the insurance policy to cover the Employer impact is also worth investing in if not already coevred. Especialy given the rates based on policy costs too me appearing cheap and rasing flags given the odd's of somebody getting cancer or a road accident that could very well limit there ability to work.
4) Quality of work, if somebody who was able to be very productive has an injury that whilst not preventing them from working, yet reduces there productivity in a measurable way - then how i that covered? This is probably a situation when you have a employee contract and that employee is so good he does other area's of work that everybody accepts without his contract being updated. I know many people in IT who have a contract saying that they are say a DBA and yet they do sys admin, backups and other tasks that build up that if they just worked to contract and did database work then other area's would fall apart. Though is very much a area of managment limits and avoiding giving people pay rises that just seems to happen. But in IT you would find your contract being very open in definition of your role or be updating that contract weekly (can you halp me move this printer - sure let me get that added to my contract so I'm allowed to move heavy objects) and could get silly. But from an impact perspective, if they can do a 2 week holiday without them being missed beyond there defined role then your probably safe, though if you end up calling them during that period then in short your being unfair to that employee (or allowing him to be unfair to his or her self, more the case); Which could have a noticable impact - not just in situations of them unable to do there job, but if they leave (which is how most communicate that they feel undervalued instead of talking with you about it, least with many IT types who are good at the job).
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But for an employee, this type of cost for the return is frankly a no brainer given the example costs and with that I still can't help feel that the prices are perhaps too cheap and some actuary has messed up. I hope that ain't so, and my be that every other type of insurance is so over priced that I'm conditioned that way. But having worked in reinsurance, I do feel the risk and as such the cost of claim do seem somewhat out of sync and could be an insurance industries asbestos waiting to happen. But were all IT geeks and we now know how contracts and courts work so again this type of insurance for the cost is really just a no brainer that it can actualy save you and your family money to the extent that it is cheaper to insure the whole company instead of just yourself for family peace of mind - crazy and yet that is the case. But do check all the contract clauses as it does seem too cheap.
Currently working for a company that doesn't offer LTD, and it scares me whenever I think about not having it, but not enough to buy it on my own. It's definitely a major plus.