Finding a good health plan for you and your family or finding a quality and budget friendly employee benefits package for employees is a difficult, multi-faceted decision. Keeping the complexity of these decisions in mind, General Insurance Services (GIS) and The Michigan City Chamber of Commerce are proud to be partners with UnitedHealthcare to help their members find the right plan for them.
GIS Employee Benefits Advisor Candace Arvin works closely with UnitedHealthcare, and she shared that GIS focuses on advocating for clients to get them the resources that fit their needs, so GIS’s partnership with UnitedHealthcare is a natural fit.
“Our goal is to help clients build an employee benefits package that’s going to be effective for their people and budget friendly,” Arvin said. “Where UnitedHealthcare has been a great partner is they have some creative products and solutions that help us in achieving those goals for some of the clients we work with.”
While GIS does not advocate for any one specific solution, plan, product, or carrier, UnitedHealthcare’s offerings have been a great fit for many GIS clients. For small businesses, taking advantage of a UnitedHealthcare plan has proven effective in more ways than one.
“As an advisor, my goal is always to help employers minimize their healthcare expense so that they can maximize their business growth,” Arvin said. “Any dollars saved on insurance premiums are dollars that can then be reinvested back into their companies to help purchase equipment and hire more people. All in all, employee benefits are a great way to recruit and maintain talent for their organizations.”
The values and innovation that GIS and UnitedHealthcare have in common have helped to further their relationship. Arvin appreciates that UnitedHealthcare takes feedback from everyone—brokers and members alike—and turns that feedback into action.
UnitedHealthcare’s commitment to communication also stands out to The Michigan City Chamber of Commerce President Katie Eaton.
“They are very responsive to what our needs are,” Eaton said. “We’re not health insurance experts here at the chamber, so being able to get on a call with them or get some marketing material from them so that we can relay that information to our members has been pretty easy and very successful.”
Back in 2020, the chamber started having preliminary conversations to see if UnitedHealthcare had something worthwhile that it could offer to its members. What prompted these conversations was a survey the chamber sent out to its members in 2019 to explore the struggles of their small and medium-sized businesses. When the surveys were completed, chamber leaders discovered that the majority wanted to see a reduction in cost to provide health insurance to employees.
This compelled the chamber to develop a relationship with UnitedHealthcare, which now offers the chamber an additional 5% off the All Savers program for chamber members who choose to participate. Eaton has been thrilled with the program thus far.
“It’s definitely a program we are committed to for the long haul. I think it will continue to gain participation as we roll it out and have conversations with members moving forward,” she said.
While needs vary from person to person, consequently meaning no one employee benefits package is perfect for everyone, GIS and the chamber are grateful for the options UnitedHealthcare provides.
“UnitedHealthcare has planted their flag in the Region,” Arvin said. “They live here, they work here, they play here, so they have a vested interest in bringing quality products and solutions to the community where they and their families live. They are one of the most nationwide, major medical providers. We want to be associated with A-rated carriers and with those who share like-minded values and are innovative in their approach to what they’re bringing to the market.”
To learn more about UnitedHealthcare, visit https://www.uhc.com/.
