Group Health
Related Topics
2009 Greater Milwaukee Annual Health Care Benefits Survey Results
Why just one broker?
Shop around and select the best broker first. Find the broker who will negotiate most effectively on your behalf.
Many employers believe they will get the best deal on their health insurance by getting multiple brokers to shop around for them. While this sounds logical, enlisting multiple brokers can actually lead to higher rates and a lower-quality result. A quality health insurance broker will have access to all of the insurance companies, not just a limited number. As a result, if you use multiple brokers, they submit requests for quotes (RFQ) to the same insurance companies.
This is a problem for one primary reason. When an insurance company is presented with the same RFQ from multiple brokers, they don't know which broker will ultimately carry the most influence with the client. As a result, they hedge their bets, and send back the same generic proposal to each broker. These "vanilla" proposals are not aggressively priced nor do they offer optimal coverage. The point is: by using multiple brokers, you actually get back less competitive quotes with less value-added; the opposite of your objective.
Compliance Issues
At R&R Insurance Services, we are aware of the complex group health plan compliance issues facing the industry on a consistent basis and pride ourselves on making sure you understand them as well. If the law changes and it affects your plan, we'll work through the changes to ensure your compliance. Our FutureOffice virtual HR software will also keep you up to date on employment law changes. The following legislative updates are just a few of the areas in which we offer education and expertise to our clients:
- Medicare
- FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act)
- COBRA
- HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)
- Section 125
- WFTRA (Working Families Tax Relief Act)
- FSA (Flexible Spending Account)
- Limited Purpose FS
- Consumer Driven Health Plans
- HSA (Health Savings Account)
- HRA (Health Reimbursement Account)
Third party Administrators
- The flexibility for the TPA to administer a variety of benefit plans
- Ability to administer claims on a timely and accurate basis
- Flexible re-pricing philosophy on claims
- Percentage of claims that are adjudicated based on an automated system versus manually
- Compliance with current ERISA and HIPAA regulations
- Educational programs as well as regulatory compliance reporting
In addition, we’ll address the implementation process, minimum reporting requirements and performance guarantees.
Our criteria for utilizing third party administrators:
Cobra Administration
There is a little known Cobra law that requires communication between you, the administrator, and your new hire. A law that if not realized, could hold you, the business owner, personally liable for up to $320/day/employee on your health insurance plan!
Would you like to relieve yourself of that liability and all of the other aspects of Cobra administration? At R&R we have a procedure to deal with all of your Cobra issues, known and unknown. It’s a simple solution; we outsource your Cobra duties to a third-party administrator and let them work for you at our expense. Benefit to you: no Cobra fiduciary responsibility whatsoever, and more time to deal with more important issues.
