Costco, eh? Never would have crossed my mind. I'll check it out. I also suggested to her that she look on the exchange and see if it's competitive. If so, I'd cover the cost via higher pay. Bad idea?
You will get a bored person who will send you boring spreadsheets. So here's the thing about the exchange. 1) there are probably pretty rippin' subsidies available. 2) If you offer any kind of insurance plan, those subsidies are right out. For the entire company. 3) "covering the cost via higher pay" had best not be written down anywhere or it is cut-and-dried insurance fraud. I've been trying to make health insurance make sense for my employees for going on three years now. Their income levels, their hours worked and their available subsidies have meant that my cost for not boning my poorest employees is $50k a year to me... and chances have been excellent that my richest employees would turn down my insurance anyway because they're getting it for free through their spouses. So here I am, over a million dollars in revenue a year, buying insurance for a family of 3 off the exchange and waiting 4 months for an appointment to get my blood pressure meds re-upped. It's a deeply fucked up system. There's effectively no incentive for providing employer health insurance for any company under a bajillion people. We had dinner with friends on Saturday; she's the head of benefits for a cruise line and she can do things like "hey Primera our plan now covers this" and they go "yes'm". It neither helps nor hurts that her counterpart at Primera used to be her direct report when she was at Primera because when you have 50,000 employees across 24 time zones you have leverage. But if you've got nine employees? Having one of them opt out changes rates for the entire company. And uhhh when every.single.one.of.them is a woman of childbearing age... ...hold onto your butts.