In the modern workforce, providing competitive benefit options is essential in retaining and recruiting quality employees. For small business owners and managers, navigating the benefits world can be overwhelming and confusing. Maybe you’ve heard of group health insurance alternatives like the HRA, but what is an HRA and how do they work? Where did they come from? Is it an option for your company? Here is a comprehensive “HRA for Dummies” guide, to simplify and streamline your information search.  

Choosing an S-corporation to form your business comes with a number of impressive tax advantages. You don’t pay corporate income tax, and your Social Security and Medicare tax bills are lower—instead, profits are allocated to shareholders and taxed at that level.

Things get more complicated when it comes to health insurance, though. While S-corporation employees can claim employee health insurance as a tax-free benefit, shareholders who own more than 2 percent of the company stock cannot. For these individuals, the path to tax-advantaged health insurance is more complicated.

In this post, we’ll examine everything S-corp owners must do to receive company-sponsored health insurance and properly deduct those expenses from their tax bill.

The individual coverage health reimbursement arrangement (ICHRA) is inching closer to implementation: in January 2020, businesses of all sizes will be able to offer the new benefit.

One of the first steps in setting up an ICHRA is creating formal plan documents. ERISA and IRS rules require all businesses offering an employee benefit plan to set up governing documents, including businesses offering alternative health plans like the ICHRA.

Because the ICHRA is brand-new benefit, though, some businesses may be confused about their plan document requirements.

In this post, we’ll go over why your business needs ICHRA plan documents, what the documents must include, and how and where you business can create those documents.

Let’s get started.

In late March, a federal judge struck down the Labor Department’s 2018 rule expanding access to association health plans.

While in place, the rule allows small businesses and self-employed workers to band together to either buy large-group health insurance or self-insure. The rule has faced criticism, however, as association health plans aren’t subject to various Affordable Care Act protections.

Between 30 and 35 association health plans were created after the rule’s release, and currently insure thousands of workers. Now, businesses using these plans are left in limbo as the Labor Department considers whether to appeal the ruling.

In this post, we’ll examine what association health plans are, why the ruling against them was issued, and what businesses with association health plans can do now. We’ll also explore other small business alternatives to group health insurance, including the qualified small employer health reimbursement arrangement (QSEHRA).

Last year, 2018, marked the second full year small businesses had access to the qualified small employer health reimbursement arrangement (QSEHRA). PeopleKeep examined this period recently in our original study, The QSEHRA: Annual Report 2019.

In many ways, small businesses used the QSEHRA much the same way as they did in 2017. In total, they offered similar allowance amounts and their employees used about the same percentage of their available allowance as they did last year.

However, with an additional year of data behind us, we can draw new conclusions about how small businesses are using the QSEHRA now and what that means for reimbursement-based health benefits in the future.

In this post, we’ll go over five of the most important conclusions we drew from The QSEHRA: Annual Report 2019.

Let’s dive in.