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I'm not sure if this is a purely exploratory question or if you're inferring that you're planning on navigating the group health insurance market without the assistance of a broker. If the latter, I'd caution against it for several reasons (which I'll omit for now for the sake of brevity).To get a group quote, generally all that's needed is an employee census. Some states apply a modifier to the rate depending on the overall health of the group members (for a very accurate quote, employees may need to fill out general health statements).Obtaining rates themselves can take a few minutes (for states like CA which don't have a signNow health modifier) to several days.I suspect your cor question is the time/effort required once you've determined the most appropriate plan design for your company. This is variable depending on how cohesive your employee base is.Best case scenario - if all employees are in one location and available at the same time, I could bring an enrollment team and get all the paperwork done in the course of 1-3 hours depending on the size of your group. In the vast majority of cases, the employer's paperwork is typically around 6 pages of information, and the employee applications about 4-8 pages. Individually none of them take more than several minutes to complete.Feel free to contact me directly if you have specific questions or concerns.

Just went through this exercise. We're Washington state, your mileage may vary.The board of directors directive was to dramatically reduce what we were paying for health care related costs. My mission was to do so without materially screwing up anything for the employees (not necessarily supported by the BoD)Proved to be harder than expected.We had the team covered under a group policy that we were phasing out and needed to do something else. There were three choices on the table:1) Continue With a New Group From the Same or Similar Carrier2) Move to An HR Outsourcing Plan3) Move Everyone to Private Insurance and Compensate Them For ItWhen looking at this,it got to "no brainer" status pretty quickly. Cost to cover under a group plan was signNowly higher than everything else, plus had some large internal administrative costs. I was in favor of moving to an HR outsourcing plan, particularly under Insperity because we had a relationship there via another portfolio company. That proved to be hard to quantify in terms of "actual cost" -- they provide an "all in"package priced as a percentage of gross payroll (as in, they charge you x% over what your gross payroll is). There's employer contribution to FICA, FUTA, etc plus "other stuff' besides just "health insurance" in the package, so it came out to be apples-to-papayas no matter how I looked at it, but the cost seemed reasonable for what we got. The board disagreed. Leaving Option 3...So that's where I put the effort in research and execution. And I foundEmployers Can't Reimburse for Private Insurance On Pre-Tax Bais Under the ACASee this link for details Technical Release No. 2013-02, but our CPA advised that allowing employees to purchase private insurance then reimbursing them via a Section 125 plan or HRA would be disallowed. Bummer.The Tax Credit Thing Is An IssueSo, I've got a guy with a family of 5 making $70k a year, oh look, he's entitled to a tax credit of about $5600 to reduce his effective cost of insurance. Awesome! But wait - note that this is a credit, that applies on his filing his return for the calendar year, not something immediately applicable on a month by month basis.So, the employee does get the benefit, just not "right now".How Much of a Raise Do You Need?OK, take the guy from above scenario. He goes off and gets a "silver level" plan via the state health exchange for about $1k a month. Great. I'll give him a $12k a year raise. But hold on, that's taxable... so now I have to figure out how much to give him to cover the taxes on it too. And then there's the tax credit - if I don't deduct that, I wind up giving him a nice raise in terms of this giant refund he'll get when he files his taxes; if I do deduct the tax credit, he has to "front" the value of the tax credit over the course of the year, effectively giving him a salary decrease unless he also modifies his withholding...Argggh...No winners here. I wound up having the group move to private insurance, via the state health exchange, just before the March 31, 2014, end of the open enrollment period, for coverage starting May 1st. We issued a "special bonus" to cover the initial payment, which processed at time of enrollment, and we're increasing salary by (annual premium + addition tax on increase - tax credit + some extra)/ number of pay periods) Board is happy, total out of pocket to the company is down by about 15%, employees are not exactly thrilled but find the result acceptable, mainly driven by the fact that their coverage is out of the hands of the company, making them relatively safe from any cost-cutting driven "downsizing" of plan quality, and the fact that it's actually better than they had before.

For the most part two employees will constitute a group policy. In some states, some vendors will accept a company with one employee under certain conditions to fall into a small group medical plan.As an example, in Massachusetts, Blue Cross Blue Shield will accept a group of one employee and you can deal directly with the vendor. At two employees you can deal with UHC under group terms. Other vendors may require that you be part of a chamber or other such grouping to get access if you have less than 6 employees but access is there.NY is another state where you can have one employee and get a group plan. With Oxford, if you have one employee that is not an owner nor has an ownership interest, you can get a group policy. This works well in the instance of a foreign parent starting a subsidiary company in the US and having the first employee (who won’t be an owner, just a regular employee) getting things going. Probably not what you are facing but the point is the accessibility is there. Most every other vendor will write a group coverage on two employees.Be aware or residency restrictions. CA is tough here, CA vendors will do group plans starting at two employees but one thing about CA vendors is that they require that a company has at least 51% of its employees living or working in the state. This means if you have a company based in CA with two employees but one works outside of CA, you are out of luck.Participation requirements may come into play as well. You can’t have a group of say 10 employees, go apply for coverage and have 9 say ‘we don’t want it’. That won’t work. Participation will vary vendor to vendor and can be a rude surprise after a bunch of work if you don’t get the facts upfront.To wrap up the points on this, employee count will not be a huge hurdle to be eligible for a group policy. What you need to watch out for are the other points such as residency and participation. That’s where I see employers get caught up. These aspects will vary from state to state and from vendor to vendor so don’t assume if you talk to one vendor in your state that there would be uniform rules if you wanted to look at other vendors as well.If this is an issue you are facing and you could use a little guidance, here comes the shameless plug. I do a lot of this kind of work with startup companies getting the ball rolling on their benefits. Feel free to signNow out if you could use a resource on the matter.Nate TherrienFounder Business Insurance & Investment Services of MA9784007014 pnathan@bibsma.comhttp://www.bibsma.com

For the social security disability online application how do you indicate coverage by a retirees Group Health Plan rather than current employee?I think the applicant is misunderstanding their options: 1)GH; or 2) GH emp; or 3) GH other.It is possible to have coverage under all three. When in doubt,Contact Social Security By Phone at1-800-772-1213 (TTY 1-800-325-0778)Best option is to hire a SSDI lawyer on contingency basis: 25% of backpay due up to $6,000 maximum. These type of questions answered incorrectly or incompletely delay processing. If you are lucky, your initial claim will be processed in 30-90 days with a 65-70% rejection rate. The SSA appeal process averages 18 months and up to two years because of a 1.1 million case backlog.SSDI WAIT Robin Hubbard's answer to How long should I wait for Social Security disability (SSDI) benefits to be approved?

Thanks for the A2A!As Stephen and Ingrid have already said, you won't get a reply unless they want to bring you in for an interview. Sometimes the process is fast, where applicants get notification in a few days for an interview, other times it can be a long time. I've heard of friends getting invited to interviews months after submitting applications. Some employers advertise positions, put those applications in a big database, then search them when there is an opening. A want ad doesn't always mean they have an open position right now. I know it sucks not getting any feedback. An automated email saying "nope, we don't want to interview you" would be nice so at least you know where you stand. Unfortunately that is one of the many faults in the hiring process. Best of luck!

One account for all applicants is adequate assuming others are close family members. if they are not related in any way, ask them to create separate account and apply on their own. You can keep yourself as primary applicant and add family members as secondary. Just follow instructions on the website- very simpleApplication for Visitor Visa (Temporary Resident Visa - TRV)