How to offer health insurance to remote employees?

Health insurance is one of the main benefits a company can offer to their employees. But with an increasing remote workforce, providing health insurance is not always that easy. Remote employees have different needs for health insurance, and you can’t apply the rules in your country of residence to your international team.

In this guide, we explain the major challenges of offering health insurance to remote workers, and share a few solutions to this problem.

The challenges of health insurance for remote employees

Access to health care through an employer has become one of the major deciding factors for employees when looking for a new place of work. With many companies offering health insurance as a standard service as part of their benefits package, you can quickly fall behind in the race for the best international talent if you don’t offer health coverage for your employees.

But as simple as it might seem to offer health coverage to your workers, the increasing remote work movement does come with some challenges when looking for the right health insurance. 

If you are employing people who live in a different country than your company’s main location of business, you have to start looking into some other options. That includes researching available health care providers, negotiating benefit’s agreements all over the world in different languages and with local legal support, and checking the individual offers to make sure which services are covered or not. 

This is an extremely time-consuming process that can quickly become overwhelming for your legal and HR departments. But the good news is: It doesn’t have to be this complicated!

3 ways to offer health insurance to remote employees

There are a few easier ways to offer health insurance to a distributed team than to research individual offers and spend hours browsing through health care contracts. 

1. Find an international insurance provider

Many health care providers have long reacted to the ever-growing demand for international health insurance and offer a service tailored to the needs of remote workers and their employers. Therefore, it is not unlikely that your current health insurance also offers a plan for remote employees who need international coverage.

Unfortunately though, international health insurance often comes with a big price tag, as well as a lot of uncertainty around what is covered, and where it is covered. So make sure to double check the offers in detail before you sign up for an international coverage plan for your remote employees.

2. Collaborate with local health care providers

Another option is working with local insurance companies in the country of residence of your remote employees. This allows you to have a detailed overview of the services provided to your employee – and potentially save some money compared to international health insurance plans.

However, this option can quickly become extremely time-consuming if you are working with a large distributed workforce and team members that are spread all over the world. In this case, finding a local partner who can assist you with the task of finding local health insurance providers might be the more efficient option. 

3. Hire employees with an Employer of Record 

Functioning as a local partner for your remote workforce, hiring an Employer of Record (EOR) to take care of international health insurance often turns out to be not only the most efficient, but also the cheapest and most stress-free solution of them all.

An Employer of Record functions as the official legal employer of your remote team member, while you are still in charge of their day-to-day tasks and activities. You simply pass on the administrative responsibilities of hiring in a foreign country to your EOR to ensure your new employee gets all the benefits they are obliged to in their country of residence, and you are complying with local labour laws and regulations.

This also means that your Employer of Record will help you in finding the right health insurance for your remote employee, including the right plans and pricings as well as relevant coverage and legal support.

Lano offers a global Employer of Record solution. Check out all that is included in our service and sign up for a free consultation today.