The home healthcare workforce is also referred to as assisted living workers, and these companies have a lot of part-time, variable-hour employees. I believe this industry presents an excellent opportunity for you as an employee benefits advisor.

First, the population of older people over the age of 65 will nearly double from 47 million to 88 million very quickly. And if you double the number of the folks that need assisted living, you need to more than double the number of people that work to care for these people.

It’s predicted that the home healthcare workforce will be up to 2.2 million employees by next year. That is a massive opportunity for benefit advisors.

Many of these employees do not have access to employer-provided benefits. They make minimum wage, they work part-time, and their salaries don’t justify paying for a major medical plan. And often, the employer can’t justify even paying half of a bronze-level major medical plan.

Take a minute to think about what these folks do for a living. They take care of older people. And they need to be healthier than the people they’re serving. We need to provide them affordable access to quality care.

Another issue these companies have is compliance. Many of them have no idea that because they have over 50 employees, they are considered an applicable large employer and are subject to ACA reporting. This is a conversation you can have with any employer, but especially those in the home healthcare industry.

Evolved Benefits has solutions for you to bring these employers. We can help you serve more people than you are today and grow your business.

If you want to learn more, message me on LinkedIn, give me a call, or email me!

The most recent statistic shows there are 8.25 million employees in this space.

This is a massive opportunity for you!

We recently worked with a business owner who had purchased multiple pizza parlors and 7-Elevens across Washington and Oregon. As the common owner of all of these, he was now subject to the applicable large employer status because he had way more than 50 full-time equivalent employees.

And the broker was having difficulty finding a health plan for the new group because every carrier was declining to quote since there was no participation to look at from a previous health plan.

The broker connected with me.

The first order of business was getting the franchise owner on the phone with our ACA compliance partners and getting him compliant. They were able to look back to when he had first purchased the establishments, and now they are on an excellent compliance program going forward.

And we were able to offer the employees some very affordable health plans.

I speak with benefit advisors every day, and one of the common things I hear is, “I don’t know where to find business.”

The franchise industry has millions of employees who don’t have a health plan because benefit advisors in their area don’t know about our solution.

Give me a call and let me show you this deep blue ocean of opportunity that we’re swimming in.

Book a consultation: https://www.evolvedbenefits.com/contact

At Evolved Benefits, we are the inside sales arm for SBMA, which stands for Staffing Benefits and Administration. SBMA is built on staffing companies first and foremost; we found that it is one industry that’s been heavily underserved. This is because most Employee Benefits advisors focus on major medical. They look for groups that can get a lot of participation and have more employees enrolling in the major medical wellness staffing companies. Usually, there’s a core group of the office staff that they can put on a major medical plan, but everybody else hasn’t figured out how to solve and Evolve Benefits with SBMA have done a great job at providing a solution there.

So now, let’s talk about some current statistics in the staffing industry. Right now, there are around 3 million employees per week that are employed by staffing industries across the boards in different industries. There are also 16 million employees staffed throughout the year on an annual basis in America as temporary employees. So what happens with a lot of these companies is they don’t understand that they’re prey to the employer mandate, which is Penalty A and Penalty B. They’re subject to ACA filing reporting, and many of them don’t realize that they’re out of compliance. Secondly, many of them are looking for a way to be more competitive, especially if they’re in a concentrated area with more staffing companies. They need some edge to make them more competitive for their clients.

So, for instance, I drove up to Bakersfield a couple of months ago accompanied by an employee benefits advisor. We sat down with a staffing company, and they had probably one of the greatest problems a staffing company could have. They grew very quickly, and they were about to make a second location a little further up north. Sitting down with them and making a little discovery, we found out that they were out of compliance. Then we talked about the type of health benefits that we can provide, our minimum essential coverage plan coupled with some limited medical plans, and some other worksite benefits that marry up very well and make it affordable for these folks to access quality health care. So the first order of business was getting on the phone with our HCA accounting partner to solve the compliance issue. And then we turned around and enrolled every single one of these folks on one of our plans that they chose the base plan. The feedback I got from the staffing company owners during that first meeting was something that I always say just because I understand how this works, but it means so much more when you see a company say this because the light bulb goes off in their head.

They say, “Hey, you know what? We don’t want to offer your minimum central coverage plan. We want to provide your dental, vision, and limited medical plan. We want to go to our clients and say, hey, you know if you send your employees through us, we’re going to pay for a health plan, right out of the gate. These folks will have some health coverage. And in the state of California, for instance, the individual mandate is being enforced. So they helped these employees beat the penalty that they would be having for not having health insurance, but they also provided them a better dollar spend for those dollars instead of paying the penalty to the Franchise Tax Board.

So for all you Employee Benefits advisors out there, Evolved Benefits does very well with staffing companies. And if you haven’t looked into this industry, give me a call. Let’s set up a meeting to discuss certain talk tracks. I’ve got plenty of case studies from SAP and companies I’ve been involved in. And of course, I look forward to talking to all of you very soon.

Minimizing costs and increasing employee retention in the restaurant space is difficult already. Add the administrative burden of the ACA to a restaurant owner’s to-do list and you’re looking at another full-time job.

With so many intricacies and nuances surrounding the ACA, there is a lot of room for error.

Below are five common mistakes restaurant owners make in their efforts to comply with the ACA’s Employer Mandate, as well as guidance on how to avoid them, regardless of your industry.

Mistake 1: Believe full-time employees work 40 hours a week

It is commonly believed that full-time employees work 40 hours a week, but that’s not the case under the ACA. To be full-time under the rules of the ACA, employees only need to work 30 hours a week or 130 hours a month.

We’ve seen restaurants make this mistake time and time again. And when they inaccurately set this hourly requirement for being full-time, many employees get incorrectly grouped into the wrong designation.

Mistake 2: Extend health coverage offers late

Time is of the essence when extending an offer of health coverage and there is a window for when a full-time employee must receive an offer of health coverage.

Depending on the measurement method used to determine full-time status, an employee hired with the understanding that he or she will be working full-time designated hours by an employer may be required to receive an offer of coverage by the first day of the fourth calendar month from their date of hire. For instance, someone hired on March 6, may need to receive an offer of healthcare benefits by June 1.

While it’s true Limited Non-Assessment Periods provide employees with more time for not offering coverage, restaurant owners frequently apply them incorrectly and subsequently miss the window for offering coverage.

Mistake 3: Offer Unaffordable Plans

Offering health insurance to 95% of your full-time workforce is one piece of the puzzle. Ensuring the plan is affordable and meets Minimum Value is the other. And too often we see restaurant owners create their own methods for demonstrating affordable coverage.

Instead, they should leverage IRS safe harbors. These IRS-sanctioned methods prove affordability and there are several types, including the Federal Poverty Level Safe Harbor, The Rate of Pay Safe Harbor, and the W-2 Safe Harbor.

Mistake 4: Keep disorganized payroll records

If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to perform some general cleanup on your record keeping. Messy payroll data can result in inaccurate employee classification. Disorganized time and attendance records can result in employers failing to identify full-time employees correctly.

With inaccurate employee classifications, employers are putting themselves at greater risk by potentially failing to extend offers of coverage to eligible employees. Organized payroll and time and attendance records are critical for business success for more reasons than one. Don’t sleep on this one.

Mistake 5: Forget to make offers at the start of every plan year

Oftentimes employers think that once they extend an offer of healthcare, it’s good forever. The reality, however, is that the offer is only good for the duration of the plan year. It is important to re-offer healthcare benefits at the beginning of every plan year.

With the right information, the requirements of the ACA can be one less thing to worry about. If you’re looking to mitigate risk, don’t overlook these five common mistakes.

In fact, now is a perfect time to make some changes in how you undertake ACA compliance activities. With the 2021 ACA filing period officially behind us now, consider getting your ACA Vitals to learn about any potential hang-ups in your ACA compliance process.