[1] including "coemployers" where lots of small employers pool together for a large company plan.
Even if the costs were the same, I live in Texas. PPOs are no longer offered on the private exchanges here. Unless you have employer-provided insurance, you have to have an HMO, which I refuse to do for moral reasons.
(and adding: my previous employer was a tiny company of 12 people, but they had to provide insurance anyway due to being a defense contractor, and I was paying $40 per month for the best insurance I've ever had. The employer I had before that was a startup of the same size and refused to give any insurance or even pay us what we were worth because the owner was stingy, so stingy that he refused to seek VC because he wanted to keep ownership)
How much was the employer paying when you were paying $x/pay period? From my experience, small businesses pay a lot more per employee than large businesses and also tend to only have one option for employees.
I'm currently at a mid-size telecom with ~500 employees, and I'm really happy here. It's both the biggest and the best employer I've ever had.
1) Group health insurance plans tend to have a significant upfront cost and it's extremely expensive per-employee with a small company. Larger companies get better plans and can pay significantly less per-employee. The SHOP [1] plans out there aren't even implemented yet in many states.
2) A logical option that many businesses wanted to do was simply reimburse employees the full cost of their individual health care premiums. It seemed like a good bridge between ensuring they have coverage without getting into the extremely expensive weeds of group plans. But for some absurd reason/loophole, that's actually illegal. And there's a $100/day ($36,500/yr) per employee fine if you reimburse employees for health insurance. [2]
[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/small-businesses/employers/
[2] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employer-health-care... Question #1.
Second, I live in Texas. PPOs are no longer offered on the private exchanges here. Unless you have employer-provided insurance, you have to have an HMO, which I refuse to do for moral reasons. Even if it was legal, I wouldn't work at any company whose sole insurance option is to reimburse employees for the cost of individual plans because individual plans are not an option here.
This is simply the result of stingy, greedy owners trying to keep everything for themselves. The company I worked at before the defense contractor was about the same size, but not only did they not provide benefits, but they provided laughably low salaries (I was making $47k/year when recruiters were telling me I should be making $60-65k, and the defense contractor I jumped ship to paid me $65k), refused to provide any equity to anyone except to maybe the first two technical hires, and refused to seek any investment above the angel level because the owner wanted to keep ownership for himself.
If a business cannot afford to properly compensate their employees, they should not be in business. Period. Size isn't an excuse. And that means the <50-employee exception needs to go. And so does the <15-employee exception for EEOC (and some cities, including my own, have the same exception for their local non-discrimination laws).
If you're a small business, you should have three options: 1) offer full benefits and pay a competitive salary, 2) treat your staff as co-founders and give us both equity and public recognition as co-founders, or 3) you close your doors.
And on a similar note, unless federal laws change, I refuse to ever work for a company with fewer than 15 employees again (unless they're a defense contractor), as companies of that size are exempt from the EEOC and from the requirement to provide health insurance (and as someone who dealt with both discrimination and a company that refused to give anyone insurance, those are both personally important to me).