Employer Insights

There are many challenges to overcome when an organization is determining what employer health insurance plan is the best fit for their specific needs. However, there are professionals who can help guide you through the process, such as health insurance brokers, employer benefits advisors, and consultants. What are each of these roles and how do they differ?

To help navigate the potential advantages and pitfalls in their paths, employers and their HR departments have historically turned to outside employer health insurance brokers in order to present them with options and help advise the decision-making process. As the employer health insurance market has in many ways become increasingly complicated over the years (and because there can be a perceived conflict of interest with regard to broker commission structure), additional guidance roles have been established to fill the informational gaps.

Those roles are often labeled employer health insurance advisor/consultant or employee benefits advisors, but - as with employer health insurance brokers – their function is guiding employers toward their ideally optimized health and benefit plan coverage. Given that all of these labels accompany a similar advisory role, one of the main differences is how each may be compensated – although there is a great deal of overlap there, as well.

What is an Employer Health Insurance Broker?

Traditionally, employer health insurance brokers have been the primary means through which companies have attained employer health insurance benefits for their employees. Brokers often work directly with one or more insurance providers and will typically be required at some point in the coverage process even when working with an outside advisor or consultant to build the coverage plan for the employer.

• Primary function: Analyze the circumstances of a given employer and provide options to resolve their employer health insurance needs.

• Payment and compensation: Typically commission-based, though there are exceptions.

• Differentiating factor: Brokers are licensed professionals who work directly with one or more health insurance providers. The options they are able to provide an employer may be limited by their relationships with affiliate insurance providers, but they are also the most direct way to access those insurance providers given that employee benefits consultants and advisors will still need to go through an employer health insurance broker in order to execute the plan.

What is an Employee Benefits Advisor?

Employee benefits advisors primarily serve a complementary role to brokers in an employer’s effort to attain health insurance coverage for the company employees.

In fact, after working with a client to determine the ideal scope of coverage for that client, employee benefits advisors will then assist the client in evaluating potential brokers in order to assess which broker can provide the coverage that best fits the client’s needs.

• Primary function: Analyze the circumstances of a given employer and provide options to resolve their employer health insurance needs, including making connections with relevantly specialized brokers and vetting choices in accordance with their clients’ goals.

• Payment and compensation: Typically fee-based, though commission-based and other arrangements are also possible.

• Differentiating factor: In addition to employer health insurance coverage, employee benefits advisors may take a broader approach to optimizing employee benefits plans and have more tools at their disposal than employer health insurance coverage alone when helping an employer put together a comprehensive benefits package uniquely suited to their organizational needs.

What is an Employee Health Insurance Consultant?

Similar to an Employee Benefits Advisor, Employee Health Insurance Consultants serve a complementary role to brokers. In many ways, the designations of benefits advisors and consultants can be interchangeable, although such designations can be used to convey distinctions between fee structure or the depth of background analysis involved in general.

• Primary function: Analyze the circumstances of a given employer and provide options to resolve their employer health insurance needs, including making connections with relevantly specialized brokers and vetting choices in accordance with their clients’ goals.

• Payment and compensation: Can be either fee or commission-based.

• Differentiating factor: As a term, employer benefit consultant can for the most part be used interchangeably with employer benefit advisor, although using ‘consultant’ may imply a greater degree of emphasis on the initial conditional analysis while using ‘advisor’ typically places more focus on the advisement with regard to selecting from among employer health insurance coverage and brokerage options going forward.

How to Find a Good Employee Benefits Advisor

When selecting someone to help guide your organization through the procurement of employer health insurance – whether it be a broker, an employee benefits advisor, or a consultant – the key questions to ask are what relationships and specialization does this person have that may either limit or expand the options that they can present me with as a result.

Also, it is important to understand how this person will be compensated for their work and how that incentive structure may in turn affect the advice you receive, how reliable you feel that it is, and with what confidence you can assure others in your organization that you have achieved the optimum result.

Additionally, in the process of selecting a broker, employee benefits advisor, or consultant to work with, you may find it advisable to search among professionals in those fields who operate locally and/or who specialize in your industry if there are industry-specific factors that may require special consideration.

In fact, you may wish to contact such a professional to help determine if there are industry-specific considerations that you may be able to benefit from and to which you are otherwise currently unaware.

You may even want to contact the brokers, consultants, and/or employee benefits advisors who have been working with those tiresome competitors who keep poaching your talent – or perhaps you’d be better served by contacting the advisors and brokers of the competitor with such thoughtful and comprehensive benefits packages that their employees can’t seem to be poached.

Find the Right Insurance Broker Today

Luckily, searching for the right broker, consultant, or employee benefits advisor to best serve the needs of your organization is easier than ever before through harnessing the power of public databases. Not only can you refine your search by a variety of different criteria, you will also have access to an algorithmically compiled rating system, thereby ensuring that the professional you choose to work with is verifiably capable of meeting your needs.

With such powerful tools at your disposal - despite that the employer health insurance and benefit plan market may seem murkier than ever - finding the perfect broker, consultant, or employer benefits advisor to suit your organization’s needs requires little more than a few clicks to get the process started.

Mployer Advisor helps employers find top-rated insurance brokers, advisors, and consultants. Our listing database also showcases customer reviews and feedback to help you compare and evaluate different brokers. Start your search today.

About Mployer Advisor

At Mployer Advisor, our focus is creating transparency in the insurance and insurance broker, consultant and advisor space to the advantage of the employer. Analytics is our core and we will bring to light new information, tools and resources to aid employers in making more cost-effective decisions. As a phase I, we are here to help employers find the right broker or consultant and the right insurance company for them. Giving choice and initial transparency is a first step in creating an employer centric insurance marketplace.

Employer Health Insurance Overview

Health insurance pools can be difficult waters to navigate even for an individual concerned only with their individual needs, but those difficulties are often multiplied when dealing with employer health insurance on an institutional scale.

Because of the multifaceted layers of complexity contained within the commercial healthcare market, the best advice for anyone attempting to secure new commercial coverage or to make updates to their organization’s existing policy, is simply to contact a health insurance broker to serve as a guide and advisor through the employer health insurance acquisition process.

That said, not all brokers are equally suited to your organization’s specific considerations, so it’s typically best to use the available technology to refine your broker search by area, rating, and specialty, as well as becoming generally familiar with your organization's needs and legal requirements in advance in order to better facilitate the process.

Is My Business Legally Required to Provide Health Insurance?

The first question most purchasers of employer health insurance want to ask is whether or not they are legally required to provide health insurance to their employees in the first place. The answer to this question will largely be determined by whether or not your organization qualifies as a small employer or a large employer in accordance with the operative federal regulations. This of course begs the question, how large does an employer have to become before they cross the threshold from small to large qualification?

The simplest answer is that there’s no simple answer. The general cut off is 25 full-time employees or fewer to be exempt from federal coverage requirements. However, there are thresholds for the qualifying number of full-time employees at 50 and 100 with significant implications for the withholding, reporting, and coverage requirements, as well as the coverage plan options available at those levels.

Even this oversimplified answer raises an additional question of what constitutes a full-time employee (typically 30 hours per week), which in turn raises further questions about how those hours are calculated and over what period of time (e.g. based on the average of the previous year in general).

In short, the complexity of the matters involved makes it highly advisable for those who are inexperienced in the space to seek outside guidance in order to become better informed about the options and obstacles specific to the unique needs of their organization.

What If I Don’t Provide the Required Insurance Coverage?

So, what happens if your organization crosses the threshold that mandates employer health insurance coverage, but your organization’s health insurance provisions (or lack thereof) fail to meet the federal requirements?

First, crossing the threshold doesn’t necessarily mean your organization is immediately in violation (see complexities above), though it may require the employer health insurance coverage package or benefits be increased in the future in order to meet increased regulatory standards of the higher employee tier.

Continued violation, on the other hand, whether willful or not, will result in fines imposed by the IRS for failure to provide employer health care coverage in accordance with an employer of your organization’s size. In such cases, fines will be determined based on information specific to your organization, so outside guidance from an advisor, employee benefits consultant, or licensed broker is again recommended prior to incurring such penalties.

What are Additional Benefits of Employer Health Insurance?

In addition to fines, qualifying large employers (ALEs) who fail to meet the minimum federal regulatory requirements miss the crucial opportunity to utilize the advantage that comprehensive and sometimes creative or uniquely tailored benefits packages can provide to an organization in the current highly competitive talent retention environment.

In order to obtain those very advantages, in fact, many smaller employers who are exempt or qualify for limited regulatory oversight and looser coverage standards are choosing to opt in for additional coverage benefits that can act as an effective talent retention and recruitment tool and help the organization stand out in a crowded industry.

This strategy can be particularly effective in recruitment as it sets an immediate tone with prospective hires that the company prioritizes the needs and well-being of its employees.

Similarly, uniquely tailored benefits packages can be extremely effective at retaining talent and rewarding longevity and loyalty by acknowledging the reality of the costs that accumulate over the period of time it takes for employees to earn experience. This helps employers display that loyalty in return.

How Can I Get My Business Covered?

With all of the many considerations that must be taken into account when complying with federal employer health insurance standards, it is important to evaluate not just the size and structure of your organization in relation to regulatory guidelines, but also to consider any needs that may be specific or unique to your company or industry.

In light of those specifics, consider how your benefits package could be arranged to best fulfill those needs – both from a recruitment and retention perspective as well as from the standpoint of optimized business productivity via happy and healthy employees.

With the vast variety of benefits options and brokers available combined with the current technological search capabilities to instantly find the best fit for your organization, there is no excuse not to make sure your current employer health insurance benefits and incentive options are not only in compliance with federal law, but are maximizing the value of those expenditures to benefit not only the employees, but also the organization as a whole.

About Mployer Advisor

At Mployer Advisor, our focus is creating transparency in the insurance and insurance broker, consultant and advisor space to the advantage of the employer. Analytics is our core and we will bring to light new information, tools and resources to aid employers in making more cost-effective decisions. As a phase I, we are here to help employers find the right broker or consultant and the right insurance company for them. Giving choice and initial transparency is a first step in creating an employer centric insurance marketplace.

What is Cyber Insurance?

Cyber insurance is a type of commercial insurance that can cover a significant variety of electronic communication, technological, and other cyber-related risks that modern companies face.

At its most basic, cyber insurance is intended to cover your business against damages caused by cybersecurity infractions and other cyber-related liabilities.

While the mind may first imagine hackers and other external threats as the quintessential agents of cyber malfeasance, internal threats (whether criminal, such as a data breach committed by an employee; or accidental, like a code glitch that brings the network down) can be covered by cyber insurance as well, depending on the terms of a given policy.

Cybersecurity & Cyber Stability: Increasingly Relevant Business Considerations

Cyber insurance in one form or another has been around since at least the 1990s. Historically associated with cybersecurity as business operations have become ever more dependent on properly functioning technology, cyber insurance has evolved to cover threats ranging from external and internal to accidental, as well as general cyber stability fortification acknowledging the crucial role that properly functioning electronic communications systems and other cyber-related technologies play in modern business.

While cybersecurity has emerged as a vital business consideration as the threat of electronic crime and the sophistication of the methods by which it is perpetrated have grown proportionally, cyber insurance has become an increasingly common defense mechanism that many companies have been including among their means of protection.

Because it is relatively novel, however, and because of the significant scope of both the threats and the damage that may result from cyber liabilities, coverage and policy terms that fall under the umbrella term of cyber insurance may vary widely.

Is Cyber Insurance Right for Your Business?

The first step in determining the type and scope of cyber insurance that best suits your needs is to evaluate the scope of liability exposure as a result of cyber threats that potentially threaten your business.

Does your company:

• Maintain digital records containing the personal information of clients or customers?

• Maintain digital records containing the banking or credit card information of clients or customers?

• Have digitally accessible information that may be considered confidential and/or is otherwise subject to some form of non-disclosure agreement, or similar document?

• Have digitally accessible intellectual property that might be of value to competitors?

• Use any digital platforms (either internal or external) in the operation of your business that, if shut down or otherwise made inoperable, would severely hinder your ability to conduct business?

• Have digitally accessible employee records or personal information that, if stolen or exposed, could create a liability?

• Communicate any potentially sensitive information across non-secure lines of electronic communication?

• Send or receive data that could critically affect business operations if that data or documentation were to be stolen, altered, or compromised in any way?

For those who answer yes to any of the above questions, then some form of cyber insurance may very likely be a wise decision for you and your business. The question then becomes what scope of coverage is best suited to limiting your risk and exposure in the event of cybercrime.

Some potential areas of policy coverage include data breaches, negligently spreading a virus that impairs another company’s ability to conduct business, denial of service attacks, media/copyright/IP infringement, identity theft liability, ensuing damages, and legal representation in the event of a lawsuit.

Cyber Insurance: More Than Just Reimbursing Losses

Beyond potentially reimbursing financial losses and providing legal services in response to given occurrences covered by the policy, cyber insurance providers often include additional support services that can benefit their policy holders.

Some such services may include working directly with injured parties to recover any personal data that may have been exposed in a breach, or providing the funds necessary to hire a crew of contracted IT workers in order to resolve a network-wide outage. When it comes to cyber insurance policies, both the coverage and the remedy options are extensive to say the least.

Is Cyber Insurance Important?

Because of the ubiquitous nature of technology in the professional environment and because of the wide-ranging number of technologically-related events that could potentially disrupt that workflow to disastrous effect, cyber insurance can seem fairly intimidating at the outset. By the same token, however, that ubiquity and the vast number of potential threats, malicious and otherwise, is exactly what makes cyber insurance such an important investment for security, coverage, and specialized help in the unfortunate (though seemingly nearly inevitable) occasion when it is needed.

In addition to the many advantages that come with comprehensive cyber insurance coverage, one of the biggest benefits comes before the policy is even written – when the insurance provider tests your current levels of security to probe for weaknesses and potential liabilities.

Cyber Insurance: How To Get Covered

Fortunately, the very same technological developments that further ingrain our digital dependence with the benefit of seemingly endless efficiency improvements at the expense of increased exposure to liability and bad actors, also provide solutions. In this case, publicly available databases have been compiled and mined in order to simplify your search for a cyber insurance professional that can help develop a cyber insurance policy and plan that is perfectly tailored to the needs of you and your business.

Whether you’re looking for a cyber insurance broker or just an advisor or consultant to help you better understand your own cyber-related needs before entering the market, Mployer Advisor can help. You can search for cyber insurance professionals operating in your area and sort by ratings, specialties, and several other criteria to help refine the coverage factors that are most important to you.

About Mployer Advisor

At Mployer Advisor, our focus is creating transparency in the insurance and insurance broker, consultant and advisor space to the advantage of the employer. Analytics is our core and we will bring to light new information, tools and resources to aid employers in making more cost-effective decisions. As a phase I, we are here to help employers find the right broker or consultant and the right insurance company for them. Giving choice and initial transparency is a first step in creating an employer centric insurance marketplace.

What is Commercial Insurance?

Commercial Insurance is a general term that is used to describe a category of insurance primarily used by businesses, professionals, sole proprietors, and sometimes contract workers.

Falling under the commercial insurance header are subcategories of insurance covering everything for which a business might need insurance from employee health insurance pools and workers comp, to insurance on inventory and property or rental insurance.

Essentially, nearly every conceivable category for which insurance exists can fall under the domain of commercial insurance if that insurance is being used to protect against liabilities and risk exposure encountered in the course of doing business.

What Does Commercial Insurance Cover?

Commercial insurance encompasses an incredibly broad scope of insurance offerings, but in general it can be broken down into two categories: the insuring of assets and insuring against liabilities incurred in the course of business that could negatively affect the course of business.

Insuring Assets

Several types of assets require insurance, including physical assets, intangible assets, and human capital assets.

Some examples of physical assets requiring insurance are real estate, vehicle fleets, and inventory – which each require unique types of commercial insurance protection (e.g. fire & flood, collision, loss/damage).

Examples of intangible assets are brand/trademark value, proprietary secrets, or some kind of competitive advantage - which can all be so integral to a company’s success that insurance against damage or infringement to those intangible assets is necessary to properly manage such a significant risk.

Human capital assets are a hybrid of physical and intangible assets in a sense, covering everything from employee health insurance to protecting against the loss of particularly valuable star employees.

Insuring Liabilities

Unlike insuring assets, which primarily provides protection against future loss or damage to things of existing value to the businesses, insuring liabilities protects against events future loss or damage caused by the business to things that have value to other parties - potentially including coverage both for liabilities created by actions of the company as well as liabilities that are passively caused.

Actively created liabilities include both mistakes and events brought about through the normal operations of the business.

In the case of mistakes, businesses or professionals may be negligent, commit malpractice, or make some other kind of error or omission that causes harm to another party, such as a client, customer, or supplier.

Some examples of these kind of mistakes could include a wedding planner who ordered the wrong color flowers, a surgeon who misplaces a sponge, or a CPA who forgets to mail a client’s taxes on time, not only incurring fines on behalf of his client but also undermining a financing prospect that was dependent upon promptly filed returns.

In addition to mistakes which definitionally manifest as some aberration from standard business operational practices, liabilities can potentially also be created simply by conducting business as usual and inadvertently causing some form of harm or otherwise putting the company on the receiving end of potential legal action.

Some examples could include a car mechanic who does additional damage to a vehicle in the normal diagnostic process, or a commercial developer whose excavation blasting is near certain to create foundational issues for the building next door, or a swimming pool operator being sued by a lifeguard with skin cancer for not providing umbrellas in the lifeguard stands despite no law or policy requiring them.

In these cases, wrongdoing or a mistake having been made is not necessarily as important as causation in determining fault, and claims do not necessarily need to have merit in order to expose a defendant to significant legal expense, at the very least.

In addition to actively created liabilities, businesses are often exposed to passively created liabilities.

Unlike the actively created liabilities that come about as the result of normal business operations, passive liabilities come about through no direct action of the client and are often the result of outside forces that disrupt normal operations thereby causing harm to other parties or the business itself.

Some examples of outside forces disrupting normal operations and causing harm to other parties include a house painter working on a windy day whose paint spray gets carried on the breeze onto the car next door, or a product wholesaler who fails to meet fulfillment orders because a civil war has broken out in the country where the product is manufactured.

Some examples of outside forces disrupting normal operations and causing harm to the business itself include a tornado destroying a company’s distribution hub, or hackers denying service to the company network halting productivity for two week, or the unforeseen retirement of a brand’s figurehead marketing engine.

It should be noted that in many of these examples, there are arguably more than one cause and more than one party harmed as a result.

What Kinds of Commercial Insurance Do You Need and How Do You Get it?

Businesses seeking to better manage their risk have a wide variety of commercial insurance policies and coverage area options. The key to making sure that you have at least the minimum advisable amount of coverage is to know your business inside and out and to thoroughly consider the scenarios most likely to expose you to liability.

The first step is to minimize that liability exposure by taking proactive measures not only to prevent scenarios that might cause harm but also to shore up your business’s resilience in the case some harm befalls it.

The next step is contacting a business insurance broker or agent with experience in your industry who can help you determine the best fit coverage for the specific liabilities to which you and your business are most exposed.

As the commercial insurance market has become increasingly complex with each new policy variation and coverage option, brokers and agents have become more and more specialized. Searching by knowledge areas as well as other factors like location can be accomplished fairly easily through the use of large databases.

On Mployer Advisor, you can easily search for and compare top-rated insurance brokers near you. Start your search today.

About Mployer Advisor

At Mployer Advisor, our focus is creating transparency in the insurance and insurance broker, consultant and advisor space to the advantage of the employer. Analytics is our core and we will bring to light new information, tools and resources to aid employers in making more cost-effective decisions. As a phase I, we are here to help employers find the right broker or consultant and the right insurance company for them. Giving choice and initial transparency is a first step in creating an employer centric insurance marketplace.

What is a Health Insurance Broker?

Health insurance brokers provide a number of services for those seeking to purchase health insurance, whether as an individual or commercially. In addition to assisting buyers in the purchasing of health insurance, brokers typically provide continuing services to policy holders throughout the life of the policy, so choosing the right health insurance broker can be an important and sometimes long-term decision.

Are Health Insurance Brokers Required?

For individuals and some small businesses, the ACA marketplace (whether the federal or a state-operated exchange) is a viable option for purchasing coverage directly from health insurance providers.

For larger employers seeking to purchase coverage for company employees, a health insurance broker or agent is commissioned to provide guidance in determining the appropriate policy and procuring/administering the policy in conjunction with the insurance provider that is underwriting the coverage.

Health Insurance Brokers vs. Health Insurance Agents

There are several factors to consider when determining whether you and/or your business would be better suited to working with a health insurance broker or whether you ought to contact a health insurance agent to address your coverage needs.

The primary distinction between brokers and agents is that agents typically only represent (or sell policy coverage on behalf of) one insurance company, whereas brokers are a type of agent that typically work directly with anywhere from one to several different insurance companies at the same time.

With the wealth of information about their policy offerings that insurance providers make publicly available, you may be able to narrow down your search to a single, specific insurance provider, in which case contacting an agent that works directly with that insurance provider would be the most direct path to obtaining coverage. Similarly, if the industry in which you operate your business has any special insurance considerations that need to be accounted for in policy or coverage decisions, then contacting an agent with relevant experience who has previously worked with companies in your industry can be an efficient approach.

On the other hand, for those individuals or businesses who are entering the employer health insurance market with less familiarity and may not have yet have determined their exact needs in advance, sometimes contracting a health insurance broker that works with several insurance providers can potentially provide a greater range of policy options in determining the best coverage fit.

What Kind of Help Do You Need?

Finding the best health insurance broker or agent to suit your needs depends upon first determining what it is that you need. If you know exactly the kind of policy you want and which insurer you’d like to work with, then choosing your agent or broker may be simply a question of experience in your industry, or location proximity, or complementary personalities, or all of the above.

Alternatively, if you haven’t yet determined your needs and you’re seeking significant guidance in figuring out exactly the type of coverage that is best for you and your company, then you might prefer to work with a broker whose multiple insurer affiliations provide a wide range of policy coverage choices, or working with a broker that has specific experience in your industry might be even more helpful, or perhaps you’d like to work with a broker with both attributes.

Because of the continuing nature of the broker/agent and policy holder relationship, an understanding of your company needs both in the present and as your business continues to grow and evolve should be primary considerations when evaluating compatibility with a new insurance broker or agent. For this reason, it can be very helpful to inquire about a potential broker or agent’s background before (or outside of) their career in the health insurance industry if there are any aspects to your business for which specific background knowledge may be beneficial.

How to Find the Right Broker or Agent for You

With an understanding of what you’re looking for in mind, the next step is to locate and vet potential broker or agent candidates. At a bare minimum, health insurance agents and brokers alike both require proper licensure from the state in order to operate, and there are several independent organizations from which some useful information about brokers and agents can be obtained and/or verified, such as the National Association of Health Underwriters (NAHU) and Health Agents for America Inc. (HAFA).

Additionally, many times local civic organizations and business collectives can be great resources when seeking or vetting independent brokers and agents. Further, referral business based on reputational recognition have long been mainstays in the health insurance brokerage business.

Learn more about how to find a new health insurance broker.

As technology has evolved, so has the health insurance brokerage business as well as the means by which potential clients can search for and evaluate brokers and agents. To stand out from the crowd, many brokers and agents have become more specialized than ever in an effort to differentiate themselves and carve out a niche expertise. 

Also, for some clients, geographic considerations are less of a concern than ever before because of instant, omnipresent communications technology. Meanwhile, because of that same omnipresent communications tech, others might feel that having a local agent is more valuable than ever. Regardless of what you and your business are looking for, luckily the database technology has kept up, allowing you to search for health insurance brokers and agents in your local area and/or that specialize in your industry.

On Mployer Advisor, you can easily search for brokers near you, then sort by whatever additional criteria are most important to you, whether it's data-driven performance ratings, insurance provider affiliations, customer reviews, or a number of other criteria. 

Searching for and vetting the right health insurance broker or agent for you and your business is easier now that it has ever been before. Start your search today with Mployer Advisor.

About Mployer Advisor

At Mployer Advisor, our focus is creating transparency in the insurance and insurance broker, consultant and advisor space to the advantage of the employer. Analytics is our core and we will bring to light new information, tools and resources to aid employers in making more cost-effective decisions. As a phase I, we are here to help employers find the right broker or consultant and the right insurance company for them. Giving choice and initial transparency is a first step in creating an employer centric insurance marketplace.