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Health Insurance Exchanges for Businesses

What is a health insurance exchange? This is a way for your state (or the federal government) to organize an insurance marketplace for individuals and small businesses. These exchanges simplify your ability to gather and compare health insurance quotes. Health insurance exchanges also help reduce premium prices by pooling people together. The ultimate goal is that buying health insurance on the exchange generates greater transparency, efficiency, and competition for consumers. Here are a few benefits that might make a health insurance exchange better than compiling a traditional set of quotes:

  • Access to free calculators and other e-tools to determine coverage, pricing, and eligibility.
  • Simple and standardized plan options that make it easy to compare and contrast plans.
  • An affordability calculator for employee sponsored coverage

How Options Might be Impacted

Although the above are federal standards, each state has a fair amount of autonomy over how they run their health insurance exchange and you will want to be aware of a few things to understand how your options might be impacted:

Consider the size of your state’s exchange:

A smaller number of people enrolled in a health insurance exchange makes price negotiation more difficult and there might be better options outside of the exchange.

Explore how many insurance companies are in your state’s marketplace:

Some insurance exchanges don’t attract enough insurers to provide you with adequate options.

Think about what happens to all of the information the exchange collects:

Inputting accurate information is very important during the application process. Your data is communicated directly to the Department of Treasury.

Additional Awareness and Considerations

Awareness will help you determine how best to use the insurance exchange. Beyond these considerations you’ll want to ponder yourself, health insurance exchanges offer a variety of cost-saving benefits.

Using Insurance Exchanges to Save Money

The most obvious benefit of a health insurance exchange is the power of numbers – pooling people together makes negotiating better prices that much easier, but the cost saving benefits don’t stop there:

Tax Benefits

One of the required functions of an insurance exchange is to determine eligibility for tax credits, and can even facilitate advance payments of tax credits.

 

Free Choice Vouchers

Employees who cannot afford the plan you’ve selected will have the option to select a plan from the health insurance exchange that’s within their price range.

 

The Best of Both Worlds

Although many aspects of an insurance exchange are designed to be user friendly, working with an agent who understands how each plan works can help you save even more.


Insurance Exchange Quotes

When you’re putting together quotes from your health insurance exchange you may want to consider the following factors:

Provider Networks

You may come across the perfect insurance quote that covers everything you think your employees would want, but, if it only covers a few providers, options for care will still be very limited.

Deductibles

This can make a big difference in the premium you pay, but it can put extra burdens on your employees to get the care and coverage they need, or it can require you to add features like a Health Savings Account to your benefits package.

Coinsurance vs. Co-Pay

Understanding what options are available through your insurance exchange and how these impact the out-of-pocket cost for employees will be important to understand and communicate.

Prescription Coverage

This can be one of the most complex aspects to health insurance coverage and the tier of coverage could play a role in premium differences in your quotes.

Related Product Offerings

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Group health insurance plans come in all shapes and sizes depending on your business and employees. Navigating all of the many available options can be a challenge. Learn how we can help.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Answers to Frequently Asked Insurance Exchanges Questions

What are Health Insurance Exchanges?

A health insurance exchange is a federal or state marketplace that allows individuals and small businesses to leverage applicants for reduced premiums.

Can anyone buy insurance on the exchange?

Almost. All legal US citizens (there is eligibility for some qualified immigration statuses) can purchase health insurance on the exchange.

Contact Us

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If you want to find the most suitable health insurance plan for the right price, get in touch with a team member at Ansay & Associates for assistance.

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