Hello!!

What do you all do for Health insurance? Do you offer it to your teachers? What about for yourself?

I've been wondering how that works for business owners and freelance teachers/artists.


Thanks!

I offer my instructor health insurance. She picked out the policy through Blue Cross and I reimburse her.

I don't offer health insurance. I get mine through my other job, and if I didn't have that, I would get it through my husbands job.

I have a day job that I get my health insurance through. I couldn't pay for it with my ballet school income.

I get my health insurance through blue cross through our chamber since I don't qualify for health insurance bc I had heart surgery. To get mine I have to offer it to any qualified insurance. My one girl who qualifies already has insurance but I have to offer it. It's not too expensive. I would pay for half of their and they would pay for the rest so it will cost me about $150 a month per qualifying employee.

I think it will be nice when I have more true part time employees (they have to work 22.5 hours or something like that a week to qualify) to be able to offer that benefit. Benefits really help employees stay loyal!

I also went through our chamber of commerce--spent $200 to join so I could get on their insurance, & all they ended up doing was connecting me with their broker! I'm no longer a member of the chamber, but their broker turned me on to insurance that's sort of individual, in that my employees & I get to choose whatever plan suits our family's needs, & it's definitely NOT a group plan (the broker was very specific about that), but it gets paid by me on what's called a list bill, or one big bill with all of us listed. There are no minimum hours needed to qualify. I have 8 employees, but most have insurance through their husbands or other jobs. Right now, only 1 has her insurance through the studio, plus my husband & me. Not sure about my instructor's plan, but my hubby & I decided to get a high deductible HSA, or health savings account, which allows us to transfer pre-tax dollars to a special savings account that is not taxed, but which can only be used for health expenses, from prescriptions to hospital bills to office visits. We access it with a debit card. Once we've paid $5000 in a calendar year, the insurance pays for 100% of everything. Stinks when all we need is an office or ER visit, but it was the most affordable option for us with him being a smoker & me having some health issues that disqualified me from most other insurance. I also like being able offer insurance as an option to my employees, although at the moment, I can't afford to pay their premiums (or even part of them) as part of that benefit; they pay it themselves, taken out of their paychecks like payroll taxes are. We got it set up so the premiums could be paid from our pre-tax dollars, so we all end up paying less in taxes--yay!