Ep. 114: How We Provide Health Insurance To Our OFS

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 114, how we provide health insurance to our OFS. So should you provide health insurance to your OFS here in the US health insurance is legally required. It's not required for companies to provide it. It's required for individuals to have it. In the Philippines, that's not the case at all. It's not required for individuals and it's not required for companies to provide it. It is a perk for businesses that can afford it. It's one of the things that. It's a big reason why people stay at work, which is also true in the. In the US It's a big reason that ties people to a business. However, Philippines Companies must provide PhilHealth to their employees. PhilHealth is the Philippines socialized medicine system. It is. They don't have a full. Like, everything is paid for by the government. PhilHealth just kind of reduces bills when they go to the hospital. It helps them when they need a prescription, it helps them when they go to the hospital, helps them when they're hospitalized or with a surgery. It'll reduce their bills. They're still gonna have to pay for most of it out of pocket. This is required for Philippines employers. You're not a Philippines employer, so it's not required for you, but it's a really good idea to provide this to your team in the Philippines. We provide an additional amount to each OFS salary to cover their PhilHealth payment, and you can work with them. We'll link the description about how you can figure out how much you should be covering. And it's. It's pretty dang reasonable. So for a few years now, we've also been offering private health insurance plans, an hmo, to our team in the Philippines. And just so you know, an HMO is like. It's a health insurance organization. It's kind of bigger. But I'm going to call everything an HMO here because that's what. That's typically how they refer to it in the Philippines. We did this for our team just to provide them better coverage so they can have coverage for checkups or preventative care or outpatient procedures, or if they get really sick or hospitalizations, they're covered. Our team is covered. So because we don't have an entity in the Philippines, we're a US Company. We do not have an LLC or a corporation or anything in the Philippines. We don't have an Office in the Philippines. We don't have a location there. We cannot provide a group plan to our workers. They're all also independent contractors, so they're not employees. And so we can't provide health insurance for them. So instead what we do is we allow them to do research in their area for the best HMO, which HMOs are geographically based in the Philippines, similar to how they are in the US and they're different in different regions. And then they get to choose the HMO that they want. And Hazel, our HR person, helps them with the paperwork and helps deal with the hmo. And then they pay the initial cost and we reimburse them. The cost depends on the HMO provider and the age of the plan holder. But typically it's about 20,000 pesos per year per plan holder, which is a, let's say $400. So it's $400 per year for their health insurance. Now here in the us, for my family, I'm not even sure what we pay. I think we pay like a thousand dollars a month and we have a high deductible plan. So in the Philippines, you pay $400 per year and that is not a high deductible plan. It's a pretty good health plan, so it's pretty reasonable. I can't tell you which health insurance is best. It depends on a lot of factors. But I'll provide a link in the description below for somewhere you can go that will give either you or your ofs can go that will give you guys like a bunch of different options of plans based on your region or based on their region. So it's pretty popular health aggregator in the Philippines and it should be pretty helpful. So the fact that we don't have a company in the Philippines or that you don't have a company in the Philippines does put us at a disadvantage because a group plan will be slightly cheaper. Not much slightly, but group plans usually have better coverage than individual plans. So like their limits, their caps will be higher on a group plan. Usually group plans are better. It's just not an option for us though. So I'm not really going to worry about it and neither should you. Just if you're going to do this, just provide what you can for them and they'll be super, super happy. Now, just so you know, you do not need to provide this. In fact, it probably took us 10 years of having people in the Philippines working for us before we started doing this. You do not need to do this. But. And especially not if you have, like, a temporary person, or if you have someone that you're just paying hourly. But if you start, if you get someone that, like, they're really great, and you can see this is going to work out long term, or you have a team that is, that's growing in the Philippines, this is a really easy and affordable way to buy some good loyalty and to take care of your team better. So if you find that, like, oh, yeah, I really love these people, which is what I found, and you want to take care of them, this is a really, really good way to do it. Provide them some, some better health coverage. It's super affordable. And it's really, it's been really easy for us to deal with. We just add some extra money, or we just reimburse them when they pay their annual premium.