Sacramento, California – October 28, 2026 – I spend most of my time talking to people who run businesses with part-time, seasonal, or hourly workforces. Restaurants. Farms. Cleaning companies. Staffing agencies. Almost every one of them offers some form of health coverage. Almost none of them chose that plan because they thought hard about whether their workers would actually use it.
I understand why. Benefits decisions usually happen once a year, under deadline pressure, with a broker explaining compliance requirements in language built to close the conversation quickly. The goal becomes checking a box, not solving a problem.
I want to offer a different way to think about it, because I have watched the difference it makes.
The Checkbox Problem
A compliant plan and a usable plan are not the same thing. A plan can satisfy every requirement on paper and still sit unused by the people it covers, because the deductible is too high, the network is too thin, or the employee never understood what they were signed up for in the first place.
When that happens, the employer has technically done what the law asks. The worker still has no real access to care. Nobody filed anything wrong, and nothing got fixed either.
Sharon Rowell and I started WorXsiteHR in 2013 because we kept running into this gap. WorXsiteHR is the exclusive third-party administrator for the HealthWorX Plan, a no-cost medical plan subsidized by a non-profit. It exists specifically for lower-income, part-time, and seasonal workers, the group most likely to be covered on paper and uncovered in practice.
What I Ask Employers to Consider
Before signing a renewal, I ask employers to sit with a few plain questions. Would your own family use this plan if they had no other choice? Could a worker explain, in their own words, what it actually covers? Does the cost structure assume a paycheck that a seasonal or part-time employee does not have?
These are not legal questions. A plan can pass every regulatory test and still fail all three. That gap is where most of the wasted money and wasted goodwill in employee benefits lives.
I am not asking employers to spend more. The nonprofit-subsidized model behind HealthWorX moves over one hundred million dollars a year in healthcare services and premiums to families who otherwise could not afford care, without charging the worker at the point of use. The lesson there is not that generosity requires a bigger budget. It is that design matters more than dollars.
A Different Starting Point
I would rather employers start from the worker’s actual week than from the compliance calendar. A seasonal farmworker does not experience their benefits as a line in an employee handbook. They experience it as whether they can walk into a clinic without worrying about the bill, or whether they skip the visit and hope the problem goes away on its own.
That is the standard I apply at WorXsiteHR, and it is the standard I would ask any employer reading this to apply the next time a broker slides a renewal packet across the table. Ask what the plan does for the people, not just what it does for the file.
I have spent my career moving between history, business, and health sciences, and the one pattern that holds across all three is simple: systems built around paperwork serve the paperwork. Systems built around people serve people. Health coverage is no exception.
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About John Zabasky
John Zabasky is the CEO of WorXsiteHR Insurance Solutions, Inc., based in California. He co-founded the company in 2013 with Sharon Rowell, as the exclusive third-party administrator for the HealthWorX Plan, a no-cost medical plan subsidized by a non-profit for lower-income, part-time, and seasonal workers. He holds degrees in history, business, and information systems, and is currently a PhD candidate in health sciences.
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