“Saved … roughly $400,000 over a four-year period”
Thomas Faria, President
Sheffield Pharmaceuticals
New London, CT
162 employees, insuring 75
“First of all, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you all. I think this is truly a very important topic to talk about, especially for small businesses because as you review information and some of the topics that are most important to small businesses, what usually rises to the top is the ever-increasing costs and the unknown costs of the future of providing health care for their employees.
Our experience that got us and Sheffield to try self-insurance, it really started in 2007. Up until that point, every year we would go through and review our health care costs and quote them, and we would expect a moderate increase of 5 to 10 percent on our insurance premiums. In 2007, we had a few unfortunate events with our employees. They were using-that caused our healthcare costs to go up. In response to that, our fully-insured provider increased our rates 25 percent. The next year, they were looking to increase our rates 39 percent, and when we looked around for any comparable products from their competitors, they were even higher. So at that point we took a look at and really did a leap of faith knowing that our staff were both fairly young and fairly healthy, we went for the opportunity to self-insure ourselves, and we have been doing that since 2009. What I can say is that so far that has been a great decision. We have saved over that four-year period roughly $400,000 compared to what we would have paid for our insurance premiums. And that is about a 19 percent savings. What we did with that savings, really, that allowed us to keep our benefits the same. We have a gold quality insurance program and we have kept that affordable for our employees.”
