If you are an employee of a small or medium-sized company, or have any family or friends in the same position, read on…

Many companies cannot afford a conventional group benefits plan due to the cost. Whether an employer is fully funding the plan or the employees are sharing in the costs, based upon the plan’s usage, premiums more than likely will also go up. 

This can result in employees removing themselves from the plan (for example if they don’t use it as much as others), causing further cost increases to each individual remaining on the plan.

Large organizations have enough staff to avoid these setbacks as there is a larger pool of individuals sharing the costs. However, smaller to medium-sized businesses that want to provide benefits for their employees can’t always manage these rising costs along with the uncertainty.

Enter Kibono Inc.: an exclusively online, Healthcare Spending Account (HSA) and employee benefits platform.

The employer can create an environment that benefits both themselves and their employees:

The benefit to the employee – provides them with tax-free reimbursements of their eligible medical expenses

The benefit to the employer – puts a cap on premiums: they know what the maximum amount will be based on the usage of their employees with zero worry or confusion about rising premium costs.

Take the above verses traditional group benefits:

• The employer creates category limits for medical expenses (for example, paramedical services at a maximum of $400 per practitioner per year, with maximums per visit/follow-up)
• Overall, these plans can become confusing due to the product design which simply means decisions for each type of claimable expense (category limits, types of eligible medical expenses, etc.)
• Separate from the employee benefits (medical expense reimbursements), there most likely would be group life insurance for each employee and their dependents coupled with other add-ons such as disability insurance (DI) and/or critical illness (CI) insurance

Kibono’s foundation is the HSA portion but the overall focus is unbundling group insurance. We separate the benefits portion from the group insurance portion to make these plans much more cost-effective.

 The employer can fully manage and organize benefits for each employee under their company profile, with each having the ability to spend up to their annual limit within their employee class, assuming it is an eligible medical expense.

Employees get reimbursed by their employer, who is essentially self-funding/insuring the medical expenses (benefits portion) for each employee in the organization.

The cap is given on premiums because the employer now knows the spending limits of each individual. The premiums become a tax-deductible business expense to the employer, and are 100% tax-free for the employee.