In the past, a lot of staffing services companies and temporary employment companies didn’t really offer much in the way of health benefits. In fact, neither did a lot of the companies that were using them. Businesses in all kinds of industries found ways of shuffling off healthcare requirements, whether it was by creating new part-time positions, using contractors, or otherwise getting around the expensive idea of dispensing salary and health benefits to each worker.
These days, things are a lot different. The Affordable Care Act has dramatically changed the landscape of employment-based health insurance. It means that workers of all kinds are finally seeing a big sea change that will lead to many more of them being covered in 2015 and beyond.
ACA and “Play or Pay”
One aspect of the new health reform law is a set of “play or pay” requirements that kick in on Jan. 1, 2015. Companies with 100 or more full-time and part-time workers, many staffing firms among them, will be required to provide certain kinds of minimum coverage to workers, or will otherwise pay a set amount in “excise tax.” This is a strong incentive for companies to go ahead and include more of their workers on their group benefits roles.
Will Staffing Firms Offer Health Insurance?
The short answer to this is that yes, many of them will. While the play or pay requirements offer an incentive to offer health insurance, the ACA also does away with a lot of traditional obstacles to offering these kinds of plans.
One of these obstacles was what experts would call ‘adverse selection.’ Insurance companies found it risky to give health insurance to temporary workers, partly because of some inherent risk calculations related to their employment. The idea of dropping and adding people on a regular basis was not feasible.
A lot of the reason why this type of coverage wasn’t working was due to clauses on pre-existing conditions. People had to have the same policy in place from before the time when they contracted a chronic illness, or it just wouldn’t be covered.
The ACA changes all that by requiring health insurance companies to take one customers regardless of whether they have pre-existing conditions. And that means that getting group benefits to temporary workers just got a lot easier.
Learning More About the ACA and Coverage Options
Workers can go directly to their HR departments to learn more about how a given company will work with them on health insurance. They can also go to the Hetlhcare.gov website for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to learn more about their other option, which is to participate in private insurance pools through a state exchange. In other words, if a company doesn’t offer health benefits, the worker now has another place to buy — on public state healthcare insurance markets, set up and supported by the federal government.
For more on trends in the workplace and what to expect in 2015, keep checking the Full Steam Staffing blog as we cover what we have seen as a top California staffing company.