PCA Articles

As a business owner, you know keeping excess costs down requires planning and strategy development. But, when it comes to healthcare for you and your employees, you likely can’t imagine providing these benefits at a low cost.

Perhaps your rates went up last year and your current plan became too expensive. Maybe you decided to opt out of providing healthcare altogether. We know what a struggle providing healthcare benefits can be for companies of any size, small or large. That’s why we have been working hard to help you on the healthcare front, and we’re making progress.

Since late 2018, PCA has been working with Decisely, a benefits broker, to assess the potential of bringing “collectively sourced” benefits like healthcare, dental, vision and even retirement plans to the painting industry. This process looks at the entire industry as a whole and works with insurers to obtain coverages for those working in the painting industry.

The data we collected in the phase 1 survey shows:

• 50 percent of respondents are insured through the Affordable Care Act and another 20 percent have no insurance at all.
• 86 percent of respondents showed intense and overwhelming support of a collectively sourced benefits plan.

After analyzing the results of phase 1, we have realized there is room for improvement in the industry and probably your company. Contractors and business owners just like you have expressed a great deal of interest in improving the current state of benefits in our industry.

How We Can Make This Happen:

Because of the significant success of the first survey, we moved into a new data collection phase that will help PCA move the project into its next big hurdle– underwriting. In the underwriting phase, the amount of coverage, rates and other plan-specific information will be determined.

Insurers will not consider our industry for collective benefits without us first providing some data to them. Actuaries want to know more about the people working in the industry before they will offer plans.

Think your business is too small to matter? We need companies of all sizes from two employees on up. We need help from every painting contractor in the industry, and it’s simple to do.

We won’t know what the opportunity is unless we get the data we need on 1,500 employees in the paint contracting industry. Will you help bring these important benefits to the entire painting industry?

If you have any specific questions, please contact John Schwent at jschwent@pdca.org.