Around this time each year, the all-volunteer personnel committee at Unitarian Universalist Society: East in Manchester sits down with a broker to select an employee health insurance plan for the coming fiscal year.
Only three of the church’s six employees are on the plan, yet it costs about 10% of the nonprofit’s annual $500,000 budget. And each year, their carriers’ rates have gone up often by double-digit percentages.
Many small businesses and nonprofits in Connecticut face a similar conundrum, weighing the solvency of their business against how generous they’d like to be with employee health benefits.