NC lags behind in offering small businesses a health care lifeline | Opinion

The author is the Executive Director of Lakewood Avenue Children’s School in Durham, NC, a local childcare provider that employs eight full-time and three part-time employees and serves 33 children.

North Carolina’s small businesses create jobs, serve customers, and make up the fabric of our communities. But as affordability and inflation continue to put pressure on small businesses, health coverage has become one of the hardest — and most important — investments we make. There are not enough options available that enable small businesses to offer quality, affordable health coverage for their employees while managing rising costs.

Child care providers are essential parts of our state’s economy, and yet we’re often the very type of small businesses that are impacted by a lack of health care coverage options. Many families want small schools for their small children because they offer warm, loving environments with experienced, dependable educators. Operators of these smaller centers want to provide good benefits to their employees, but in North Carolina, their size can be a disadvantage because businesses with fewer than 12 employees are prevented from accessing what’s known as level funded health plans.

Level‑funded plans blend features of fully insured and self‑funded coverage, giving employers predictable monthly payments while allowing them to directly fund medical claims. The plans give small businesses another way to provide quality health coverage with predictability, cost savings, and transparency. Not every plan is right for every business. That is why competition and choice matter: more options would allow small businesses to find coverage that better meet their needs and those of their employees.

North Carolina is an outlier in this regard because state law prohibits businesses with fewer than 12 employees from accessing level-funded health plans. Expanding access to these plans is a simple, pro-business step our leaders can take to meet this need.

The rest of the country has embraced level-funded plans as an important option. Currently, businesses with five or more employees can purchase a level-funded plan in 43 of the 46 states that offer them, including all of our neighboring states.

Expanding the market to provide more options would let us choose the plan that best meets our needs. That helps businesses prosper and gives more people access to meaningful, affordable health coverage. That is a win-win.

Small businesses invest in our employees, attract talent to our state, and fuel North Carolina’s economy. Now, we need our leaders to help make North Carolina the best place to start and grow a small business by giving us more options to support our people. Whether it’s a small, neighborhood childcare center, a local plumber or a corner store, all small businesses in North Carolina and their employees deserve equal access to coverage.