3 Reasons You Should Offer Excepted Benefits to Your Employees

As a company leader, business owner, or human resources professional, you know the importance and compliance requirements of offering benefits to your teams. But there are new ways to provide key options in today’s post-pandemic landscape. What your business bottom line needs is a flexible solution. What your employees need are benefits and health coverage options that work for them. The answer to both may just be excepted benefits. Today, we’ll highlight what you need to know about them and provide strategic advantages behind offering them to your staff.

The Affordable Care Act defines excepted benefits as a roster of covered health services that a traditional health plan is required to cover. Excepted benefits, however, are not subject to the ACA market reform requirements or any HIPAA portability requirements.

1. Excepted Benefits Can Attract and Retain Top Talent

Today’s workplace environment is volatile. Businesses returning to normal operations are still finding new ways forward in terms of hiring and onboarding best practices. In addition, teams are more remote now, meaning greater access to pools of nationwide talent. And it’s a jobseeker’s market, meaning if you’re not separating your company offerings from the masses, your job opening may be tougher to fill.

Benefits Today’s Employees Want Most

Today’s workers have shifted their priorities to include more must-have benefits beyond the annual salary. So if your business seeks to attract new talent, you’ll need to offer robust options for affordable health insurance. Excepted benefits can play a role here since they generally include coverages for extras, including maternity and newborn care, emergency services, and ambulatory patient care.

Preventive Care and Wellness Initiatives Matter

As a nation, everyone has become more health-conscious, meaning if your company doesn’t implement health and wellness initiatives, you could be unattractive to new hires. Of course, gym memberships are always helpful. But the excepted benefits, which include coverages for preventive care doctor visits and routine health screenings, will be far more beneficial. And these types of additional and optional benefits can help employees bridge any coverage or cost gaps between their budgets and traditional health plan coverages.

Retaining Your Best Teams

As you review your past and present benefits roster, it may help to survey your current staff for feedback. If they have new needs or preferences for health and wellness benefits, excepted benefits can be the tool you leverage to meet those new needs. Keep your existing teams happy and improve your overall employee retention by providing just what they’re asking for in terms of benefits. Excepted benefits make healthcare more affordable for them. And happy and healthy employees become more productive for you.

2. Flexibility and Control of Your Bottom Line

As an employer, especially in today’s market, you are always looking for ways to control costs and leverage flexibility with operations and provisions that routinely change. An excepted benefits health reimbursement arrangement may just be the solution you need to all of your employee health benefits concerns. You can find the flexibility and cost control that your bottom line and employees both need right now.

What Is an EBHRA?

The excepted benefits health reimbursement arrangement allows companies of all sizes to offer tax-free reimbursements to their employees for certain medical or health-related expenses not covered by their health plans. These reimbursements can include costs for health services, vision, or dental care.

Leveraging the Flexibility to Design a Customized Benefit

Similar to traditional health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs,) the EBHRA allows employers to customize the insurance experience based on company size, employee needs, and overall budgets. As the business owner, you can decide what to cover and set reimbursement limits based on company affordability. Taking advantage of the EBHRA can become incredibly cost-effective for these reasons alone. The maximum reimbursement is up to $1,800 annually and is adjusted for inflation over time.

Employees Enjoy Benefits Flexibility

One of the overarching advantages of offering an EBHRA is that, unlike traditional insurance, the individual employee can select the benefits reimbursements they want and avoid paying hefty premiums for services they don’t need. Because these EBHRAs don’t cover the basics for health insurance, they serve as an added choice at the employee level, in conjunction with a health insurance plan. They can then select a combination of health coverage benefits that suits their needs precisely.

3. The Competitive Advantage for Offering Excepted Benefits

In addition to the aforementioned key benefits, there are additional advantages available to companies offering excepted benefits to their teams. All stats, definitions, and analytics aside, these are the strategic aspects of providing excepted benefits company owners need to know. Excepted benefits may just be the no-brainer implementation your company needs.

The Financial Advantage

Supplementing an existing group health insurance plan or HRA variant with excepted benefits provides financial advantages. The tax savings alone for the reimbursements, depending on the size of your company, could be substantial. But you’ll also be providing a direct benefit in a flexible and controlled cost platform set by you to meet budget affordability. Offer and pay for only what you can afford and still be offering the must-have benefits your teams prefer.

The Company Growth Advantage

A company that offers excepted benefits could have a significant competitive advantage. Onboarding and retaining new hires is easier when you have a robust excepted benefits plan in place, attractive to most job seekers. Scaling, remote working environments, and company growth are all attainable with the happiest and most productive employees. Excepted benefits can be the addition to your company perks that allows you to stand apart from others in your space.

The W3LL Advantage

The other advantage your company has is the potential for a W3LL partnership to help develop and establish the health benefits options ecosystem ideal for your company. Whether it’s with excepted benefits health reimbursement arrangements, or individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements, we can help you create, implement, and manage the most conducive solutions for all your health benefits needs.

When you’re ready to offer excepted benefits to your teams, let W3LL guide your efforts!