New Jersey Group Health Plan

New Jersey defines small companies for the sake of group health insurance as an employer with between 2-49 employees. In order to provide group insurance rates in New Jersey, it is a bit different than other close states such as New York. As such, a complete employee census must be provided for the entire company wishing to secure pricing. The census must include, age, gender, family status, home zip code.

The state of New Jersey is a modified community-rated system which allows insurance carriers to take in to account the gender, and age of employees along with location of the business, when calculating group insurance rates.

There are normally 5-7 leading carriers in the health market in New Jersey:  Horizon Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Aetna, Cigna, Oxford Health Plans (owned by United Healthcare), Health Net, and Amerihealth.

Most carriers offer products along the full spectrum – PPO, HMO, POS, NG POS, NG HMO, EPO, H.S.A qualified plans, and also HRA products.

Insurance carriers file their rates with the NJ state department of Insurance at the beginning of the year and then each quarter the rates increase. As such during the course of the year insurance carriers can adjust their quarterly rates moving throughout the year.