Jonathan Hays

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.