Small Business Health Plan Finder

Hi I’m Craig Stoltz the Managing Editor of Healthcare.gov.  What I’d like to do now is show you a new feature of the site, one that will allow you as a small business owner to see all the choices available to you for health insurance for your employees in your zip code.  So let me show you how, within one minute, putting in some very basic information, you can find out about all the insurance options available to you, let’s get started.  You need to tell us what state you live in, let’s choose Florida.  Then you say at the bottom here, that you’re a small employer, then you click Next, on the next screen there’s just one question, you say ‘I need health insurance for my employees’, click Submit, click Learn More.  Now these are the last questions you’ll need to answer:  let’s put in our zip code, it’s in Broward County, 3-3-3-2-1.  And let’s say I have 29 employees at my small business.  I click Submit.  And here you see a couple disclaimers – that’s the kind of thing you’ll not find from commercial insurance services. You have 69 choices of private insurance products. That’s a lot.  So let’s talk about how you could filter those results.  The first way you could filter this is by doctor choice.  So let’s choose PPO. That provides 30 choices which is good but it’s still too many, so let’s filter it one more time, this time you’re gonna choose plans that are eligible for health savings accounts. And you’ll see there are 9 private insurance products that are available to you. 

Let’s say that you want to compare insurance products from different companies. You choose those, go back to the top, you click, Compare These Products.  Now what you have here very quickly is a tool that let’s you compare 3 different plans apples against apples against apples.  You could compare the average cost per enrollee for all these plans.  You can see one is as high as 746 dollars per month, and one as low as 248 dollars a month.  You could find out what the various deductible options are for your employees. You could find out about the range of co-pays that the employees would have to pay, coinsurance; it even lets you check what drugs are covered at what level.  You could also see what benefits are included, what benefits are excluded, which benefits are limited, and which can be purchased for additional cost.  So as you can see, this new tool allows you to find out all of your options in your zip code for coverage your employees.  It allows you to compare the plans side by side by side, to see all the features that matter the most to you.  It also gives you a place to start estimating your costs. To get in, you start at the homepage of healthcare.gov, you click on the big blue tab, and you’re ready to go. 

NOTE: The transcript for this program may have been compiled from uncorrected Closed Captioning.