New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:
The Affordable Care Act has been in effect for five years now. We decided to check in with small business owners to see how well it's worked for their families and employees. Today we're hoping to answer this question: is it possible to find affordable heath insurance for your small business under ObamaCare?
This episode was inspired by an eCommerceFuel community forum thread that blew up with store owners talking about how difficult it was to get reasonably-priced insurance and the confusion behind the process. If you're a community member, you can read it and weigh in with your own tale here.
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(With your hosts Andrew Youderian and Laura Serino of eCommerceFuel.com and guests, Chris Hillier of BenefitHealthAdvisor.com, Rick Vaughan of MileHighnetStores.com, and Ben Camerota of MVPvisuals.com)
Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel Podcast. I'm your host Andrew Youderian. Let me tell you about the chain of events that inspired this episode.
It began with a shocking realization four or five months after my daughter's birth she'd been uninsured for most of her young life. I'll spare you the gory details, but we thought we wouldn't be able to get her insurance for up to six additional months, despite wanting to pay for it under the system that we have here in the States. And then our healthcare premiums, our insurance premiums for a healthy family of four, went from $500 to over $800 per month in one year for worse coverage. Finally, we had a thread blowup in the eCommerceFuel community with store owners everywhere talking about how hard it was to get reasonably priced insurance, and how confusing the whole process was.
So today on the show, is it possible for small business owners to find decent, affordable, coverage for themselves, their families, and their employees? Or should we American based entrepreneurs just all give up and move to Canada? Or, heck, even Cuba, which in some ways, amazingly, has a more functional health care system than we do here at home.
The episode today brought to you by Laura Serino, the Community Manager here and also the new Podcast Producer who you're going to be hearing more from in the future. I'll let Laura take it from here.
Laura: Chris Hillier is one of the managing members of Benefit Health Advisor, a brokerage firm in Englewood, Colorado. He knows firsthand how challenging it can be to navigate the health insurance industry, because it's his job to work with businesses, both small and large to help them find plans. He also needs to stay on top of the many, many guidelines and Affordable Care Act policies within the industry, which isn't an easy feat.
Chris: I would tell you they are changing everyday, which doesn't make it easy. But I think some of the changes that come through on a daily basis are probably less relevant than others for most business owners, and then other changes are more significant.
For Better or Worse in 2016
Laura: Has navigating the health care industry gotten any easier or worse in 2016?
Chris: I think it's a great question. I think there's definitely aspects of healthcare that maybe have gotten easier. But by and large, I think the feedback we get most often is that it's actually become more confusing and more complicated. There's just so many more rules and regulations, especially as it relates to healthcare reform and all the different options and guidelines that the carriers give, that it's become a pretty difficult landscape to navigate generally speaking. Coverage has gone down and prices have gone up and just very briefly to explain that, I think part of it is just the increase cost of healthcare. Healthcare becomes more and more expensive each year. Medical inflation continues to rise at about two to three times regular inflation. And then in addition to that, just the administrative burden as well as all of t...