Small Businesses and the Health Insurance Market

As a small business owner, I take very seriously the benefits we offer to our team. Every year, we work with our insurance broker to find the best health insurance plans we can offer at a price point that is workable. Like most companies, we offer full medical, dental and vision, and as a rule, we always pay the premiums for the employee and their family because we just feel that's the right thing to do.

Across all of the insurance networks, the plans more or less look the same - as you progress through the tiers from Bronze to Silver to Gold, the deductibles improve and the maximum out of pocket shrinks. We have been doing this for just shy of 15 years now, and every year, the plans get worse and more expensive. Every. Single. Year. And yet, as we analyze the various plans, we continually find that even our upgraded "Gold" plan is barely more than a safety net for catastrophic or major health events.

We have changed insurance networks 3 or 4 times through the years, trying to offer the best options to the team, but honestly they all seem nearly identical. The thing that's disturbing is that because we are less than 50 employees, we don't have options to simply "buy a better plan" as some might argue. Across all of the markets, we have only one more tier (Platinum) that we could upgrade our plan to, and even that isn't what I would consider a good plan; it's simply more expensive.

These ever rising prices are increasingly becoming a huge driver of base costs for us and other small businesses. Silverpine's employees have a fairly low median age, and nothing about our working environment is even remotely dangerous – we should be an ideal candidate for an insurance company. And yet nobody is competing for our business. Nobody is innovating to provide better products and coverage for us. This is a completely broken industry. Everything about it flies in the face of healthy free market dynamics.

I don't have a definitive, corrective solution to offer – I'm not an economist. But it does seem to me that health insurance is closer to a utility (like electricity or sewer service) and as I mentioned, the tenets of capitalism don't seem to apply to it. Outside of a stock price, it barely functions as an industry and quite frankly, the entire situation is bad for American businesses, especially small businesses, like ours. Something needs to change because health insurance is not only broken for the insured, it's also broken for most of the companies that cover the lion's share of the cost of that insurance. It's time for a change.

Tools For a Distributed Software Agency - 2024

Originally inspired by Justin Williams, I try to spend some time at the end of every year reviewing and describing the various tools and software that we use at Silverpine. This is now my fifth year doing this type of retrospective. If you're interested in the previous posts, you can find them here:

We are a mobile-first software design and development agency, and as such our tools generally fall into three general buckets:

  • Communication
  • Development and Design
  • Operations

I try to be as exhaustive as I can in my list, but every year I seem to forget something. If you don't see something that you would expect to see, please reach out. Also, if you have suggestions for alternative tools, I'd love to hear about them. We are constantly trying to refine our toolset.

Communication

Slack - As a fully remote organization, I don't know how we would operate without Slack. Our usage has continued to grow as we now regularly use Huddles, Notes and Canvas in addition to the core messaging. With almost 10 years of searchable Silverpine chat history, Slack is an absolutely indispensable part of our day-to-day operation.

Zoom - There are lots of options for video-conferencing software - from Teams to Google Meet to WebEx. We have used the vast majority of them and repeatedly, Zoom is still slightly better than the competition. However, I will note that our usage has drastically fallen as our usage of Slack Huddles has sky-rocketed. That being said, whenever I need to chat with someone outside of the company, I still turn to Zoom.

Google Workspace - We regularly use Docs, Sheets, Drive and Gmail. They work and are fine. There's nothing particularly special about them, although I do find that Drive doesn't work nearly as seamlessly as Dropbox.

Dropbox - We barely use Dropbox, but we have enough legacy documents that we have a couple old accounts still hanging around. If Dropbox had better pricing for small teams, we would probably use it over Google Drive, but Dropbox is pricey enough that we can live with the deficiencies of Drive for our team sharing.

Keynote - One tool that I use frequently (and that I seem to have neglected mentioning in past years) is Apple's Keynote. Nearly every presentation I create is done in this tool. It's just so much easier to use than Powerpoint.

Operations

Harvest - Many people use Harvest for time-tracking and while it's a great tool for that function, we use it for invoicing clients. It has a pretty great search and history function. My only wish is that it had better visual reporting capabilities.

Gusto - We have been using Gusto for payroll for years. In general, we still are big proponents of it, but their service has fallen off quite a bit the past couple years. We pay for their Plus level service, and even with an elevated service level, it still takes too many calls and emails with an offshore representative to get things resolved.

Quickbooks - We use Quickbooks, and since the CPA propped-up monopoly shows no signs of cracking, you probably should use it too.

Adobe Acrobat Pro - Adobe gets a lot of heat for some of their licensing decisions, but using Acrobat Pro to handle our document digitization hasn't been a difficult choice. Whenever we need to add signatures to paper documents and create digital versions of them, Acrobat just works.

Excel - As mentioned previously, we pay for the Google Workspace suite of products. And while I do use Google Sheets frequently, I still prefer the offline capable, familiar warm embrace of Excel. You might disagree, but to me, it is the embodiment of what a spreadsheet application should be.

Development and design

Xcode - If you write iOS or Mac software (as we do) using Xcode is really the only option. I know that some people have hybrid setups with alternative text editors, and while I won't judge those people, I really do think it's just easier to use Xcode. However, I do wish Apple would focus a bit on stability and performance instead of adding features.

Android Studio - I don't personally do Android development, but I know that our Android engineers use Android Studio. It's free so I don't mind, and it sounds like there's not really a better alternative.

VS Code - It is remarkable how good VS Code is given that it's free and offered by Microsoft. Our engineers use either this or Nova for any non-native projects.

Nova - I've used Nova a few times and it's fairly intuitive and has a large, well supported plug-in architecture to a diverse set of development environments. It's a very viable alternative to VS Code, and while it isn't free like VS Code, it does have some advantages. Panic makes great products.

Tower - We don't mandate a Git client at all, but we do provide a "default" for the team. Tower is always improving and the fact that it's cross platform really seals the deal for us.

GitHub - Every now and then I am forced to use Bitbucket, and it makes me appreciate GitHub. We've been slowly moving more of our CI infrastructure into GitHub Actions as well.

Figma - The current reigning champion of wire framing and design is Figma. I was quite relieved when the Adobe acquisition fell through.

OmniGraffle - I don't love OmniGraffle, however, if you need a Visio-equivalent tool for the Mac, there aren't really many options. The interface is a little off-putting and difficult to learn, but it does what I need it to do. I really wish Microsoft would create a Mac version of Visio though.

BBEdit - I don't personally use BBEdit, but a huge number of our team does. Primarily, they use it for large file manipulation and inspection as well as just a general quick "scratchpad" for writing and note taking. It's tremendous how long BBEdit has been around and that it's still a daily driver for so many people.