Insurance marketplace puts the ‘Gravie’ on top of health benefits

For Jeff Nordeen, co-founder and partner of the digital marketing agency NordicClick Interactive, switching his 20-person company to independent health insurance marketplace Gravie made sense.

Prior to signing up for the service, Nordeen found himself taking on the role of the benefits manager and HR executive, spending hours discussing insurance with brokers and regularly fielding employee questions that he was ill equipped to answer. He also frequently saw large increases in health insurance costs year to year, and he struggled to control spending.

“At a company size of 20, we really don’t have the ability to have a full-time HR and benefits person. It just doesn’t make sense,” he says.

Across the board, employers of all sizes are struggling to manage their healthcare coverage costs, according to a report from PwC’s Health Research Institute. Small businesses, like the Minneapolis-based NordicClick, suffer from a lack of buying power compared with larger firms and they tend to pay about 18% more for the same health insurance policy, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Nordeen says making the decision to switch to Gravie, pronounced like “gravy,” was inspired by offering his employees more freedom to pick their health plans than it was about cost savings, although it has helped him control his costs.

EBN-enrollmentstress-092616.png

Employees using Gravie are given a defined amount of money from their employer to put toward a health plan, which they can use to shop for benefits on Gravie’s individual and family or private group marketplaces. If employees pick a plan that costs more than they are given, they can pay the difference themselves, he says.

“I can really control my costs, because I know how much I can afford to go up year after year, because healthcare is not getting any less expensive. But I feel like I have some more control over it,” he says.

Gravie was started in Minnesota in 2013 and claims to help small and mid-sized employers save money on insurance by letting them select their own plans from a wide variety of options. Abir Sen, CEO of Gravie, says the company has more than 60,000 employees currently using the service. Most of the employers, he says, have less than 500 employees and some may be struggling to remain on their current health plans because of the size of their business.

Employees can use Gravie to create a benefits “portfolio,” Sen says, where they can shop for health insurance from large providers like Blue Cross, United Healthcare and Humana. They can add ancillary benefits, like dental, vision and life insurance. Sen says Gravie can also create a custom marketplace based on a particular employer’s needs. Because employers are designating a specific amount of money per employee for health insurance, they can control how much to spend year-to-year, Sen says.

“I now as an employer have a lever by which I can control my spend,” Sen says.

When an employee signs up to use the service, Sen says, Gravie asks questions about their health and will recommend some plans that might be a good fit. Gravie will also search for tax credits that may help employees save money, he says. Gravie Care, the company’s advising team, assists employees with questions via telephone or instant messaging about their insurance and healthcare bills, he says.

What if we shuffle the deck chairs a bit, and put the consumer in the center of it all and force every player in the ecosystem to think of the consumer as the customer,” he says.

Kathy Hollenhorst, president and CEO of staffing company Creatis, has been using Gravie since 2015. Hollenhorst says one of the biggest benefits of using the service has been the assistance with Affordable Care Act reporting, an often burdensome task for the 120-person company.

Gravie is far from the only option for small businesses looking to get affordable health insurance. The Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP, available through the Affordable Care Act, gives employers with one to 50 workers the ability to shop for insurance in their state. Zenefits, a human capital management platform, like Gravie, helps employees browse and select health insurance plans from more than 250 carriers nationwide. HixMe and Bloom Health also offer alternatives to traditional group plans and a way to customize employee health insurance.

For Nordeen, Gravie has been a way to take much of the administrative burden of offering health insurance off his plate. Now, when employees have questions they can contact GravieCare to get their questions answered. Most employees, he says, are happy they can have more control over their health insurance.

“I feel like the staff is getting a voice in what they want and they’re actually being able to choose,” he says.

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
Enrollment Health insurance enrollment Benefits technology Benefit management Benefit strategies Healthcare benefits Voluntary benefits Benefit communication
MORE FROM EMPLOYEE BENEFIT NEWS