How to get small business health insurance

The decision to start your own business will mean that many of you will need to obtain health insurance at some point.

Whether it’s just for you or your family, it’s not something you should be trying to do without. Sadly far too many folks do take that chance and “hope” nothing will happen whenever a gap in insurance occurs.

Trying to pull that off in the future will be much harder to pull off with the new healthcare laws going into effect mandating medical health insurance for all. So… like it or not, you are going to need health insurance.

How I obtained medical health insurance

I can’t really explain every possible situation that you may encounter, but I can tell you how I handled it. I had insurance through my job way back when. I then started my business part-time, thus continuing to keep my coverage through my employer.

But when I decided to go on my own and make the cleaning business my full-time career I knew I needed to get medical insurance somehow. Keep in mind I was only looking to cover myself, as me and Sue were not married.

I also didn’t have to worry about employee coverage because those who were working for me had insurance through other means, not to mention I didn’t plan on offering insurance in the very beginning.

So to make a long story short, I went online and starting looking. After checking out a whole bunch of places I went with eHealthInsurance because they provided free instant quotes. I also liked the idea you didn’t have to deal with any pesky salesman.

The fact that the process was so easy is what appealed to me. If you have spent any time on this blog you’ll know that all I ever do is preach about making it EASY for the customer to choose YOU. So it makes sense that I like to do business with companies that do the same.

Anyway… like I said, the process was easy and went off without a hitch. I was glad I had such a good solution in place because Sue was laid off about a year later, and she needed medical insurance too. So needless to say, she also chose eHealthInsurance for her health insurance.

My medical coverage changed

One day I got talking to my insurance agent, the same guy who handled my small business liability policy. He informed me that he also offered medical insurance, and after a short chat he convinced me to switch over to what he had to offer.

I really liked my agent so I decided to throw him a bone so to speak. I made the switch, though I didn’t really save any money. This arrangement worked fine for many years or so I thought.

The one thing I started to notice was that when me and my agent sat down every year to renew the policy, my options were limited more and more. When I first started he gave me TONS of different plans to choose from, but as the years wore on I saw less and less.

The funny part was the choices that were being shown to me always seemed to be the HIGHER priced plans. Though it took me a few years to catch on, I soon realized my agent was probably doing that on purpose to increase his commission.

On a certain level I understand, as “that’s business”. But what bothered me was I considered him a “trusted advisor” who was supposed to be looking out for me, not taking advantage of me.

My medical plan comes full circle

It’s funny how sometimes you wind up back to where you were before, and this story is no different. My yearly medical insurance plan through my agent is due to expire soon (prices are generally locked for a year in case you didn’t know) and I’ll be back with eHealthInsurance shortly.

The moral of the story is to learn from my mistake of simply blindly trusting my insurance agent to look out for MY best interests. By not paying attention to this detail I probably cost myself somewhere between $100.00 and $150.00 per policy!

This means I overspent anywhere from $200.00 to $300.00 per month for me and Sue. That’s a lot of dough when you multiply it out over the course of a whole year. That money would have been much better off in my pocket than my insurance carriers!

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