Fifty bucks
a month, per person.
Your crew picks
the rest.
Stop shopping for a plan. Start setting a number. The business pays $50 to $100 a month per employee toward whatever they pick, your crew logs in and checks the boxes they actually want, and your contribution comes off at checkout.
A demo, not a quote. Major medical and catastrophic options may also sit on the menu depending on carrier, state and eligibility — quoted individually, never at a contribution-sized price.
Nobody built anything
for a nine-person bar.
You have had the conversation. An agent runs a quote, the number lands like a brick, everybody agrees to revisit it next year. Five years of next year. But the question was wrong from the start: do you want to buy health insurance for your staff? You know the answer. Here is the better one, the one nobody asks you.
Could you put $50 to $100 per person, per month, on the table?
Two ways in. Pick yours.
We offer nothing today
It is not a character flaw. You never said no to benefits — you said no to the price. Start with a number you can actually live with and work outward from there, instead of starting with a plan and flinching.
Start from a number →We have a plan and it isn’t working
Half the team waived it. The other half complains about it. Or you inherited something after an acquisition and nobody can explain it. Find out what your people would pick on their own, and whether your dollars work harder as a credit.
Rework what you have →Four steps.
One of them is yours.
You pick a number
$50 a month per employee. $75. $100. The business pays it toward whatever each person picks. Whatever survives your P&L in a slow February — that is your whole financial decision, and you can change it later.
Matt builds the menu
Coverage options from licensed carriers, priced for your team’s ages and roles, sorted toward what hourly crews actually use. You see it before anybody else does.
Your team shops
Everyone logs in, checks boxes, and sees your credit applied against their cart. No packet on the break-room table. No pitch nobody asked for.
They cover any difference
Want more than the credit buys? They add a card and pay the remainder themselves. New hire in March, same process. Somebody leaves in April, same process.
Move the slider. That’s the pitch.
No form, no email gate, no “a specialist will reach out.”
Estimate only. Not a quote, not an offer of coverage, not tax advice. Your real number depends on who enrols and what they pick. Ask your CPA how a contribution is treated.
Pressure-test these numbers →“We don’t have benefits”
stops being a sentence
anyone says.
A dollar an hour disappears into a paycheque app. Cover your team can actually use does not. Meanwhile you already spend real money on churn: ads, interviews, training, the three weeks somebody is slow, the shifts you end up covering yourself. You are not competing with a Fortune 500 here. You are competing with the place two blocks over that also says it cannot afford anything.
And the owners already doing it mostly think it works: among small-business employers who offer supplemental coverage, 66% say it helps them keep people and 63% say it helps them hire. That is their opinion rather than measured turnover, and Aflac — who sells the stuff — is who asked them. Worth knowing, not worth pretending it is proof.
Matt Ragudo ★ LICENSED ADVISOR
A working partner,
not a sales-first quote guy.
That is Matt Ragudo’s own line, and it is the whole job description. Over a decade in financial planning at wealth-management firms. Then a health insurance agency with 60 licensed agents. Then claims advocacy — standing between patients and insurers when a claim went sideways or a bill made no sense.
Originally from Hawaii, three years in Fukuoka on the JET Programme, and in Texas since 2021. He stays on after enrolment, so insurance questions stop landing in your inbox.
What actually happens
after you call.
Thirty minutes
Headcount, ages, roles, turnover, what you have already tried. No slide deck, no quote ambush. If it does not fit your shop, he says so on that call.
Your menu, built
Market access through Vector Health and Emerson Rogers, priced for your actual team rather than a generic sample.
Enrolment
He sets up the portal and walks your team through it in plain language, including the person who asks eleven questions. You keep running your business.
He stays on the phone
Claims questions, ID card problems, a bill nobody can explain. That is the call he takes, all year, not just in November.
Straight answers
No. A La Carte Health is a benefits programme. The business puts in a monthly amount per employee, and that funds a menu of coverage options from licensed carriers each person picks from. Major-medical or catastrophic options may sit on that menu depending on carrier, state and eligibility, but $50 a month does not buy major medical, and nobody here will tell you it does.
There isn’t a clever one. The business funds a monthly amount per person, your team picks from a menu of coverage options from licensed carriers, and Matt stays on as the person who calls the carrier when something goes sideways.
No, and that is rather the point. Participation minimums and group thresholds are what make small teams a bad fit for traditional plans. Here you set a budget and your people opt in individually.
The portal applies your contribution to their cart first. Anything above it is theirs, paid with their own card at checkout. You are not on the hook for their extras.
Your contribution follows enrolment. It is applied at checkout against what each person actually picks, so you are not paying for anybody who took nothing. How that is handled in your specific setup gets confirmed in writing before you start.
You set the eligibility rules, within what each carrier and benefit allows. Full-time only, after 60 days, whatever fits how you actually staff. You write it down together so it stays consistent and you are not making judgement calls shift by shift.
Not necessarily. Employees pay their remaining balance by card in the portal. If you would rather handle it another way, raise it on the call and Matt will look at what is workable for your setup.
It may be deductible as a business expense, and how employee contributions are treated can vary with your structure. Matt is not your accountant and will not pretend to be. Ask your CPA — he is happy to be on that call with them.
That is a reason to try it, not a reason to skip it. The roster moves person by person rather than as one all-or-nothing group decision. And a real menu is something to put in a job post, which the kitchen down the road may not have.
At roughly today’s rates, about $50 covers unlimited virtual doctor and mental-health visits for their whole family with no copays, plus an accident plan that pays them cash when something happens on or off the job. Push to $100 and hospital indemnity or critical illness comes into range. Real rates depend on your team and the carrier, which is what the review is for.
Nothing. Thirty minutes, and you leave knowing what $50 or $100 a month per person would actually put in front of your team — whether or not you do anything about it.
Where every number on this page comes from
Each figure below was checked against the original report, not a summary of it. Where a survey measures something narrower than “businesses with 5 to 49 people”, that is said plainly. None of these studies show cause and effect — they show what employers and employees say.
- 51% of firms with 3–49 workers offer health benefits; 93% of firms with 50+ do. Also: 46% of firms with 3–9 workers, and the reasons small firms give for offering nothing (28% too small, 27% cost). Kaiser Family Foundation, 2024 Employer Health Benefits Survey, Section 2. 2,142 firms with three or more workers. kff.org
- $8,215 single and $23,170 family average premiums at firms under 50 employees, 2024. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, MEPS Insurance Component, figure tables. Census Bureau survey of about 42,519 private-sector establishments. meps.ahrq.gov
- 50% of small-business employees could not cover $1,000 in out-of-pocket costs (44% across all company sizes). Aflac, 2025–2026 WorkForces Report, small-business fact sheet. Conducted by Kantar; 2,000 U.S. employees at companies with three or more employees, surveyed April–May 2025. Aflac defines small business as fewer than 100 employees and sells supplemental insurance. aflac.com
- 4.2% of accommodation and food services workers quit every month in 2025; 2.6% in retail. These are monthly rates, not annual. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, 2025 annual figures. bls.gov
- 82% of hiring small-business owners got few or no qualified applicants; 35% had an unfilled opening. The base is owners who were trying to hire, not all owners. NFIB, Small Business Economic Trends, August 2026. 476 usable responses. nfib.com
- 90% of employees say the need for supplemental insurance is increasing; 34% of employers offer it. All company sizes. Aflac defines supplemental insurance here as dental, life and vision. Aflac, 2025–2026 WorkForces Report. aflac.com
- 66% of small-business employers say supplemental benefits help retention; 63% say they help recruitment. The base is small-business employers who already offer supplemental insurance, and the answer is their opinion rather than measured turnover. Aflac, 2025–2026 WorkForces Report, small-business fact sheet; 1,002 employers surveyed by Kantar, April 2025. aflac.com
Deliberately not used here: replacement-cost-per-employee dollar figures. The commonly cited ones rest on research from 2006 to 2012 and do not hold up as current numbers, so this page does not put a price on losing somebody.
Thirty minutes.
No slides. No pressure.
Bring your headcount and a number you could live with. Matt will tell you straight whether this fits your shop or it doesn’t. Worst case, you find out what $50 a month per person could put on the table for your crew.
Book the 30-minute call →