Something changed in January that most Florida business owners never got a memo about — and it quietly made your group health plan a stronger recruiting tool than it was a year ago.
For the past few years, a lot of good workers in this state didn’t need much from their employer on health insurance. They bought a plan on the ACA marketplace, enhanced federal subsidies covered most of it, and the math worked. Plenty of people took that option — Florida has the largest marketplace in the country.
Those enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Congress didn’t renew them. The fallout landed on your workforce.
What Actually Happened to Their Premiums
That deductible jump is the steepest since these markets opened in 2014. Florida still leads the nation at about 4.5 million enrollees — but the direction reversed.
Here’s the part worth sitting with. The hardest-hit group wasn’t the lowest earners — it was people just over the old income cutoff for help, and workers in their twenties and thirties. Nationally, sign-ups among adults 18 to 34 fell by more than half a million. Those are your supervisors, techs, drivers, and office managers — and the people you’re trying to hire.
Many didn’t drop coverage entirely. They bought down: same insurance card, much higher deductible. On paper they’re covered. In practice, one hospital visit and they’re staring at four thousand dollars they don’t have.
Why This Matters to You Specifically
Employer coverage didn’t get cheaper this year. But the alternative got a lot worse — and that changes the comparison your employees and candidates are running in their heads.
A year ago, a solid group plan was a nice-to-have for part of your workforce. Today it’s the difference between a household that can absorb a medical bill and one that can’t. That’s what people weigh when a competitor calls them.
Three moves worth putting on the table before your next renewal:
- Reopen the conversation with employees who waived coverage. Some declined your plan because the marketplace was cheaper. That calculation may have flipped, and they may not know it. A side-by-side, employee by employee, is usually eye-opening.
- Layer in gap coverage. Accident, hospital indemnity, and critical illness plans pay cash directly to the employee when something goes wrong. Employee-paid, no direct cost to the business, and built for exactly the high-deductible problem people just walked into.
- Fund it from what you’re already spending. For qualifying employers, running benefit contributions through payroll the right way lowers taxable wages — cutting the company’s payroll tax bill and raising the employee’s take-home check at the same time. It’s the piece most owners have never had explained to them, so it’s worth spelling out.
Both Directions at Once
You can add coverage and services to your benefits package at no cost to your business — and cut thousands, or tens of thousands, off your payroll tax bill at the same time.
That reads like a sales line. Here’s the mechanism.
When benefit contributions are structured to run through payroll correctly, they come out of wages before taxes. Lower taxable wages means the company owes less in payroll taxes, and the employee’s take-home check goes up. Those savings are what pays for the program — which is why adding it doesn’t cost the business anything.
In one 17-employee group we set up, the company kept over $19,000 for the year — about $1,120 per employee — and employees averaged around $160 more per month in their paychecks. Run that per-employee number against your own headcount and you’ll see roughly where it lands for you.
What gets added on the employee’s side is the part that matters right now: 24/7 virtual urgent care, primary and chronic care, mental health support, and 1,000+ generic prescriptions delivered free — no copays, no deductible to satisfy first. The employee sitting on a $3,786 deductible now has somewhere to go that costs them nothing.
Nothing you already offer gets replaced or disturbed. Nobody pays more. These plans do have to be built correctly to hold up — that’s the part we handle.
Key Takeaways
- Enhanced ACA subsidies expired at the end of 2025 — marketplace costs rose sharply for exactly the workers you employ and recruit.
- The average marketplace deductible is now $3,786, and many employees quietly bought down to cheaper, thinner plans.
- Your group plan didn’t get cheaper, but the alternative got worse — which makes it a stronger retention and hiring tool than it was a year ago.
- Three moves before renewal: re-approach employees who waived, layer in gap coverage, and fund it through payroll.
- Structured correctly, the payroll piece adds coverage at no cost to the business while lowering payroll taxes and raising employee take-home pay.
The Window Is Now, Not December
Fourth-quarter renewals arrive fast, and rushed decisions are expensive ones. The employers who come out of this well will be the ones who looked at it in August — not the ones who signed a renewal in November and hoped nobody noticed.
If you’d like to see what this looks like for your workforce — who’s exposed, what it costs to fix, and where the payroll tax savings sit — that’s the analysis we build. No cost, no obligation. Reach out to GOAT Insurance Partners at david@goatinsurancepartners.com or 904-788-6555, and let’s look at your numbers.
Premium, deductible, and enrollment figures reflect KFF analysis of CMS 2026 Marketplace Open Enrollment data. National averages; individual results vary. This article is general information, not tax or legal advice.