One of the challenges of self-employment as an independent consultant in the U.S. is finding affordable health insurance. A health insurance broker can help you find the best plan. If you have a partner or an employee, in some states you may be eligible for a small group plan.
Find a health insurance broker for your virtual team. Now, one of the first questions a lot of folks ask in the United States is, how do I get health insurance? So, if you do not have any employees and it’s just you, then you are probably going to need to go onto the Obamacare exchanges. Pretty much it’s the only way. However, if you either partner up with someone or you can manage to hire an employee even part-time at minimum wage, then you can in many states, not all, get a small group plan. So I recommend that you listen to episode 54 of Unleashed where I interview Molly Leeds, who is a business benefits broker. Broadly, she knows health insurance very well. And we talk in that episode about the different options for small firms to get health insurance.
She also talks about her recommendations on the things that you should ask a broker about how to get health insurance. One tip about brokers is that you’re actually not really going to have to pay them because the insurance companies, by law, are required to offer the same price to you if you happen to go directly to them as if you go through a broker. So, really the broker is doing a lot of work helping you sort through and find policies that you qualify for and helping you explain the different benefit options and the price that you pay for their service just comes out of the fee that you pay to the health insurance company.
So I recommend you listen to that episode with Molly Leeds. It’s a good overview of the range of options for getting health insurance.