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Ask HN: How do we buy US health insurance for a remote team?

10 points by dfabulich ↗ HN
Everybody on our four-person team is a US citizen working from home; each of us resides in a different state. (CA, MI, MA, NY)

We're trying to buy group health insurance for our team, but we can't find any way to do it. All of the health insurance companies we've tried to contact require that we have at least 51% of our employees in that state. They literally won't take our money.

Does anybody know anybody who has solved a problem like this? What do we do? Whom can we call?

7 comments

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dangrossman
Have your employees purchase their own insurance and reimburse them. The federal (healthcare.gov) and state marketplaces have made comparison shopping and enrolling little harder than buying something on Amazon.
codegeek
One disadvantage to the employer is that the premiums will be higher for individual plans vs. group plans. So the employer will have to pay more for each employee.
caw
Not sure what the minimum number of required employees is or how much extra this costs per employee, but there's payroll services like Oasis and Trinet that offer insurance in addition to their payroll.
dfabulich
Yeah, we called Zenefits (one such service) and they weren't able to help us.
phonon
Trinet can definitely do this. (It's a PEO, not just a benefits provider/agency.)