Wouldn’t it be nice to have cost-effective small business health plans and coverage you can offer your employees?

Whether you have two employees or 20, employer-sponsored health insurance is one of the benefits workers value the most. Small business health benefits not only help secure the health of your employees, but also their families.

However, over 70 percent of small businesses today do not offer health benefits to their workers, according to a nationwide survey of more than 500 small business owners conducted by payroll startup Gusto, formerly known as ZenPayroll. That constitutes millions of businesses whose workers are left on their own when it comes to health insurance.

Small Business Health Plans

One of the reasons small businesses cite for not offering health benefits to employees is because owners feel overwhelmed by the arduous process of setting up and managing their benefits, says Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll). in its report. In fact, adds Gusto, two out of three owners feel unprepared to navigate the health insurance process, and the vast majority of them wish their brokers could make it easier to pick the best plan for their budget.

That’s why the San Francisco-based startup, which says its mission is to bring life to work, recently announced it was launching an easy and customized way for small business owners and their employees to select, enroll in, and manage their health benefits. The company says it felt it could use technology and design to help solve such an important problem for millions of people.

Solving Small Business Health Insurance Issues with Gusto

Gusto, already processing payrolls for over 30,000 small businesses annually, revealed in the press release announcing its small business health benefits plan that it is using technology to create an integrated payroll and benefits platform in order to bring simplicity and efficiency to an industry that’s currently mired in paperwork, manual data entry and errors.

“Employers and employees rely on health insurance to protect themselves and their families. It doesn’t make sense that choosing and managing such important benefits is so complicated, overwhelming and manual. I was shocked to learn that 60% of customers who transfer their existing health insurance coverage to Gusto arrive with legacy broker errors,” said Joshua Reeves, CEO and co­founder of Gusto.

But, thanks to the new small business health benefits service from Gusto, human resource managers and benefit administrators can now select tailored insurance plans and coverage to offer employees. Your employees can get health plans that are easy for them to enroll, add family members and secure the health cover that they actually need, wrote the company in a blog post.

“Our benefits are entirely online and paperless. We combine the expertise of our brokers with proprietary software to automatically recommend the best plans for an employer’s budget. It’s like Kayak for health insurance,” assures Reeves in the press release.

Gusto’s Small Business Health Benefits Offering

Gusto is perhaps the only benefits solution on the market right now that leverages data and technology to match businesses and their employees with health plans, although its health insurance offering directly pits it against crisis-plagued business rival Zenefits that already offers a similar service.

By pulling key data from its 30,000 strong small business customer base, including company location, number of employees and average employee salary, Gusto is able to match businesses and their employees with health plans that are just right for their needs and budget.

Another advantage Gusto’s small business health benefits service has over other small business payroll services and traditional insurance brokers that come to your office with printout is that its service is optimized for the mobile web and desktop, making it paperless. Moreover, its service seamlessly integrates with Gusto’s payroll service, allowing an automated and error-free process that eliminates the manual process that was once plagued by data entry mistakes.

Gusto said its new health benefits service will first be available in California. However, companies in seven other states can transfer their existing insurance policies to Gusto’s software in the meantime, including California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Ohio and Texas.

[“source-smallbiztrends”]