Usual health plans may fail to cover rising health costs and most employees are forced for extra options and savings for medical reimbursement from their employers. Therefore, employers are seeking ways to supplement these traditional health plans ensuring real requirements of their employees. Additionally, new laws force business owners to cover employee dependant even children up to age of 26.
Flexible Saving Account (FSA) is one of the valuable employer health plans to help employee save funds on health care while taking contribution from employees out of paychecks in pre-tax money.
FSA is not an alternative for health plan but can serve to supplement existing one. For instance, if an employee is paying $500 deductible before employer health plan kicked in, the amount deductible is covered by this type of account. FSAs mostly pay for co-pays, over visits to eye specialist and even prescription drugs.
Usually there is a limit for FSA payment in a year, may be $3000 or above. But employee does not have to make payments for medical care or other related services.
Additionally, there are health saving accounts that also supplement usual employer’s health plan with employee’s health plan. Through health saving accounts, employees can select to save for possible medical issues. If the funds aren’t spent in a given year, it may roll over to the next year and continue to build till it is required.
Medical saving accounts are slightly different from FSA or other traditional ones because employers are fully in charge to save money and then provide it to their employees for reimbursement of their medical expenditures. However, it may not cover all medical expenditures.
Like health saving accounts, the unused funds can be rolled over to the next year. Both Medical as well as health saving accounts are health plans but are much different in nature. In medical saving accounts employee contributes money whereas in health saving accounts entire responsibility is at employer.
Another change that helps is raising age limit (up to 26 years) for children covered under parents’ health insurance. This is really helpful for children who are unemployed and relieves anxiety by guaranteed medical care.
Allowing children under parents’ health insurance have some potential disadvantages. Premium payments may rise and managers in the company have balked at giving health insurance to children till 26 years of age. However, under this age children are mostly healthy which makes health plans rather affordable to them and health plan administrators are reluctant to propose such option to employers.
Goldleaf Health Plan Administration is professional in making arrangements and flexible implementation strategies that can be customized to any business model, try it for yours.