How to make small business health insurance less scary this year

"I’m not a health insurance expert, so how am I supposed to choose a health plan for my team?"
"When am I going to have time to choose and administer a group plan?"
"Do I even have to offer health insurance since we’re so small?"
"How will I grow without offering benefits?
"Why is small business health insurance so expensive?"

Any of this sound familiar?

Sai Arora, founder of a Silicon Valley-based Bill pay start-up called Mercoa, was grappling with these same questions in the early days of his business back when it all started in 2021 after going through the prestigious Y Combinator. He needed a way to offer their employees health benefits (and fast!) but didn’t want to mess with the complicated and expensive traditional health insurance. They also wanted their team to choose the health coverage that worked for them, rather than the company deciding what everyone gets. 

Take Command offered a people-first, tech-forward approach that helped them attract full-time employees with benefits to the startup. This new model of benefits, called a Qualified Small Employee HRA (QSEHRA), allows Mercoa to reimburse their employees for health insurance tax-free. The employees simply pick the plan that best suits their needs. It checked the boxes for remote workers, part-timers, and even those who were on their spouse’s group plans. But most importantly, it allowed Sai to grow his team.

Sai was familiar with employer-sponsored benefits and knew the drawbacks of being forced into something that wasn’t a fit, having to switch carriers and providers, and just generally not having control of your healthcare benefits. The QSEHRA model simply made sense. 

In this session, Sai Arora from Mercoa will present alongside Jack Hooper, the CEO of Take Command, the industry’s leading QSEHRA administrator. Both forward-thinking businessmen with a penchant for the tech startup world, these two business owners will discuss what kept them up at night in the early days and how they set up benefits for their team, whether it was prompted by hiring their first employees or scaling to over 100.