24 Nov 2025 · 2 min
John Jonas explains why foreign employers can't directly pay Philippine health insurance for overseas hires, then offers a workaround: reimburse employees after they submit receipts. He stresses verification over blind trust, requiring prior approval and sometimes inspecting what they bought.
Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast, the podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 11. Should you pay for health insurance benefits? So health insurance in the USA is so prevalent that often employers are scared to hire overseas or in the Philippines because they don't know how to do, quote, benefits. And I hate that word because benefits has come to be an expected required part of a business in the US and it's not actually a benefit anymore in the Philippines. So as a foreign employer, you can't actually pay for insurance directly unless you have an entity in the Philippines. And in my last podcast I talked about how difficult having an entity is, so it's not really a good option. So what we do instead is I send my employees the money to have them pay for their own insurance. And people always ask John, how do you know they're actually paying their health insurance and their sss? How do you know they're not just using that money elsewhere? And to me that's simple. I only send them the money after they've shown me receipt. So I'm willing to pay for a lot of things that'll make my OFS lives better. I want to help them, but that doesn't work mean I'm going to trust them blindly. I'm not just going to give them money, no questions asked. And this is where some of the problems come in when working with an ofs. Filipinos are trustworthy people, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise some common sense. So like we also have a computer upgrade program. We set aside $250 a year for them for each year that they work for us to buy a new computer. And we don't send them that money until they show us the receipt for the new computer and the new computer itself. We also always have them talk to us ahead of time before they are going to buy a new computer. And we talk with them about what they're going to buy and model and where they're going to get it and and then at the end they show us a receipt, ask for receipts. It's pretty simple. I have a full discussion about benefits that you can pay for and I will link to that in the description below. Talk to you in the next episode.
