A Hillsborough County company that serves health insurers will hire more than 1,000 people around Tampa in coming years, believed to be one of the biggest corporate expansions in a decade.
The company, HealthPlan Services, expects to hire 350 additional people by April in jobs including software coding, project management, membership services and sales representatives. It plans to hire hundreds more by 2018.
Gov. Rick Scott heralded the expansion at a ribbon-cutting event at HealthPlan Services’ new east Tampa office building, at 6700 Lakeview Center Drive near Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Scott handed a gold-colored medal to HealthPlan Services Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bak in praise of his company’s job-creation.
Nonetheless, the company’s recent expansion actually is a bit awkward for the governor.
HealthPlan Services is hiring partly because it expects to pick up a significant number of new customers from the new federal Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare, Bak said. Once the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the company should pick up many newly insured individual policyholders, who purchase their own insurance rather than obtain it through an employer. The company also expects many small companies to migrate their employees into individual policies, Bak said.
“There are going to be a lot of new enrollees,” he said.
Gov. Scott has spoken out against the new healthcare law, but nonetheless has advocated accepting federal dollars for the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.
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