Are Startups Shaping Healthcare’s Future?

Surprising Technology Solutions Today

If you want to see how startups are providing healthcare for their employees, check here; according to the site: “Under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), companies with 50 or more full-time employees must provide healthcare for their employees.”

This has, for a minority of businesses, been a good thing. The vast majority aren’t too pleased, and so have been forced to find an affordable way that healthcare can be provided for employees. Usually it’s going to cost around $1,000 per employee—that’s $50k a month, or $600,000 a year. It’s hard to afford!

As a result, smaller businesses that come under the penumbra of the ACA act are finding ways to get around it, and the best ways often involve innovation. Thankfully, ACA is on the way out. It has no provision in the new tax legislation recently passed by the House. That said, the bureaucratic fallout from this disastrous campaign isn’t over yet.

Some employers are looking into telecommuting healthcare solutions, which involve remote checkups facilitated technologically at a diminished cost compared to in-office visits. Other employers either give incentives for, or provide means for, proper exercise and diet. Diet and exercise really represents the best way to remain healthy, and avoid outrageous healthcare expenses.

Exponential Changes

The healthcare industry is undergoing changes that have an exponential quality to them, and at the head of those changes are startups who must provide properly for their employees. It’s a good thing to do, but it’s just not cheap right off the bat.

Granted, when employees can rest easy knowing their place of employment will provide for their physical wellbeing, then they’re likely to be more satisfied and productive. But if doing that bankrupts your company, then nobody has any safety or wellbeing.

There’s a balancing act here that requires at least $600k in annual budget for 50+ employees, not including management. Call it an even million to catch all the unexpected casts, and you’ve got a good picture.

That means a startup has to make a lot more money than that for things to work as they should. They’ve got taxes, production costs, collateral expenses, infrastructure, marketing, and legal expenses to take into account; not to mention research and development.

Considerable Figures

A company needs to bring in at least $10 million a year to have any level of profitability that would vindicate a $600,000 to $1,000,000 healthcare budget for everyone. That’s likely an under-representative figure as well, used here only for hypothetical means of illustration.

Sometimes, startups enter into partnerships with healthcare providing agencies that are developing new technologies—this is a quid pro quo way of obtaining healthcare for employees. Other times, employers work hand-in-glove with the ACA. Every company has a different way of doing it.

What’s important to remember here is that the financial incentivization behind sourcing cost-effective healthcare is forcing a certain level of innovation, making it so that keeping an eye on the growth which derives from the startup sector is a wise thing to do.