Employer Group Benefits

Interested in Providing Veterinary Healthcare as a Benefit to Your Employees?

As a small business employer ourselves, we understand that it can be difficult to attract top-quality employees. Benefits speak loudly, and especially with the current state of human health insurance many small business employers are "thinking outside the box" in order to attract quality applicants. This is especially true for small businesses trying to compete in an industry dominated by the large corporations. This is happening in veterinary medicine, too, and there is no reason you have to be affiliated with a nationwide (or worldwide) corporation to provide this benefit. Area small businesses can work together to continue to offer the best for our employees, and thereby provide the best products and services to the community.

One benefit that has been successful for us is to offer employee veterinary health care. Obviously this is a little different for us, but at the end of the day providing a benefit to our employees is a business expense like any other whether one is in that business or not. As well, we have had wellness plans in place for years for individual clients, and so combining the two (wellness plans we have in place and employer benefits that we offer our employees) seems like a natural step. These plans are infinitely customizable to fit your business, large or small. We will work with you on an individual basis to customize a plan to best fit your budgetary needs while providing a unique benefit to your employees that your competition doesn’t! We have over 20 years’ experience with wellness plans and insurance policies, and what we are offering to area businesses is the same thing that we’ve been offering our own employees for years.

There are two considerations with employee provided veterinary benefits. One is wellness care (foreseeable/routine expenses such as vaccinations, routine testing, heartworm prevention, spay/neuter, dental cleanings, etc.) and the other is sickness care—unforeseeable/not routine sicknesses, injuries, etc.

As an employer, you have several options for providing benefits for your employees for these expenses through Kyle Animal Hospital. Please know it is our understanding that these are considered taxable fringe benefits. We can discuss with you how we handle them for our employees, but consultation with a tax attorney or accountant is advised.

For sickness care, you may consider providing group pet insurance through an insurer such as Trupanion. This would be separate from any direct benefits through our hospital, but most of these policies are good through any veterinarian. You can limit the amount you contribute per employee; for instance you can agree to $50 or $100 per month that you will contribute, with the balance being paid by the employee through an after-tax payroll deduction. Many insurers (including Trupanion) offer discounts for employers using a group. Again we can discuss with you how we handle this at any time.

Another sickness benefit is that , with any wellness plan (see below), for most services outside the plan (usually sickness/unforeseen events) provided through Kyle Animal Hospital we do discount these at 10%, and some (parasite control, etc.) up to 50%.

For wellness care, we highly recommend a Health Wellness Plan. There are several levels of these—pediatrics, adults, and senior plans. They vary a bit in the services included (see separate page here). The “plus” plans include either a dental cleaning OR routine surgery such as spay/neuter. As an employer, you can provide any level of benefit to these— for example, a flat dollar amount towards a plan, the entire amount of a fixed plan, any plan for a specified number of pets, etc. These wellness plans start at under $400 a year to take care of all basic wellness care, vaccines, blood testing, heartworm prevention, etc.

What this means for you is that you can provide all anticipated wellness care for one pet for an employee for under $30 per month. Then the employee can "buy up" the services with us (either extra wellness services such as dental cleanings, spay/neuter, etc. or illness/injury), discounted at 10-25% off. If you would like, just like providing insurance, you can fund none, all, or part of this expense with the employee paying balance through payroll deduction. At the minimum this is an employee advantage to be able to pay their pet's care through monthly payroll deduction, plus the employer has the option of contributing as much or as little as you want.

We offer discounts for multiple enrollees, for example any wellness plan is 5% off if enrolled through an employer with 5 or more, and as an employer enrolled with our hospital we will allow the basic plans to be paid in 12 installments.

Please contact Anthony Pierce by phone at (512) 268-5003, social media Facebook at Facebook.com/kylevets, e-mail hospitaladministrator@kylevet.com, or just stop by if you are interested in offering this benefit to your employees!