Welcome, everyone!
We’ve gone from nasty hot to nasty wet. I hope everyone is doing okay out there.
Our first floor flooded a few nights ago in our building, but fortunately, we’re upstairs. However, my wife’s company wasn’t so lucky on the first floor. We now have the not-so-fun task of fighting with insurance companies we aren’t used to. Fingers crossed, it all works out, but glad nobody was hurt, and it’s just a loss of property.
This month we are excited to wrap up our “6 common mistakes article” with part 2 and transition into a new series of articles and videos that we’ve put together on the oh-so-fun but always-so confusing spending accounts and reimbursement arrangements.
We’ve done several articles on these, so we are sharing part 1 of 4 on the launching spending accounts and part 1 of the reimbursement account articles and will have subsequent articles in the coming months. These will all have corresponding videos for those who may not want to read and just want the cliff’s note version. We’ve even got a refreshed article on savings accounts in the series for those who are HSA fans or don’t know enough about them.
The last article is a fun rant/soapbox-type article I put together regarding the difficulty SMBs have getting their hands on their own claims data. We see this all the time, usually from clients who have come from payroll companies or brokers that didn’t do a good job, but so many people out there are making decisions on their company’s healthcare plans without knowing what their claims data look like. This matters because there are vendors that will price your programs based on risk (a more authentic form of insurance if you ask me) vs. the losses that they, as the insurer, had the prior year.
Suppose you’re a reasonably healthy company without a lot of claims risk. In that case, you can get similar or better plans for 15-30% lower than the “no-questions-asked-everyone-is-treated-the-same” approach that the Affordable Care Act small group plans have to take.
When the government gets involved, there are always winners and losers, and with the ACA, companies that were not spending a lot on claims were the losers, whereas companies that did have a lot of claims spend made out a little better, at least initially. Remember, a mechanic can’t fix your car without opening the hood and looking. Popping the hood and checking out your claims data is often a great first step to see if there could be better options for your company’s programs.
Thanks so much for everyone reading along. This is Ryan with Holloway Benefit Concepts. I’ll see you next time!
