More than 80% of employers look to adviser for PPACA education
Beginning in 2014, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires employers with more than 50 employees to offer minimal essential health coverage to employees or be subject to a penalty. More than three-fourths of employers plan to continue to offer coverage for employees once this new requirement takes effect. However, a majority of respondents are also concerned about their ability to offer affordable health coverage to full-time employees.
The 2012 Health Care Reform Survey was conducted from January 6 to February 24 by Milwaukee-based Zywave, a software provider for the insurance and financial service industries. More than 7,800 employers nationwide participated in the survey.
Respondents are from 14 business sectors, with heaviest representation from services (18%), manufacturing (15%), nonprofit (11%), health care (10%) and construction (9%). Respondents spanned organization size: 43% with less than 50 employees, 17% with 50–99 employees, 27% with 100–499 employees and 14% with more than 500 employees.
Among those surveyed, 51% will definitely continue to offer health benefit coverage, 29 % will likely continue coverage, 3% will likely discontinue coverage and 1% will definitely discontinue or have already discontinued coverage. Meanwhile 19% are unsure what they will do when the requirement goes into effect in 2014.
“These findings are consistent with other recent surveys on the topic,” says Zywave attorney Erica Storm. “Given the uncertainty surrounding health care reform, employers do not appear eager to make big changes to their benefit offerings. Plus, employers remain concerned about competing for talent and seem nervous that dropping coverage could affect recruiting and retention efforts, despite other health care options provided for in the law.”
Other survey results include:
• 57% of employers responding are concerned about their ability to offer affordable health coverage to full-time employees.
• More than three-quarters of respondents have already seen an increase in their organizations health benefit costs or expect to see an increase as a result of PPACA provisions. Sixty-three percent of employers plan to pass these increases on to employees.
• PPACA requires group health plans that provide dependent coverage of children to make that coverage available to children up to age 26. In response to this requirement, 10% of employers surveyed increased the employee share of premiums or benefit costs for all coverage, 9% increased the employee proportion of dependent coverage cost and 2% eliminated dependent coverage.
• PPACA provisions that employers are most concerned about implementing and administering include: new reporting, disclosure and notification requirements (57%), the requirement to automatically enroll new employees in a health plan (40%) and additional W-2 reporting requirements (49%).
By Marli D. Riggs
Voluntary benefits can help contain company costs
To recap a previous blog post before jumping straight in to the questions: Voluntary benefit plans help employers round out their employee benefit offerings amid cutbacks in company-paid core health care, allowing employers to provide employees with additional benefits without bearing the weight of increasing cost pressures. These optional benefits can serve as value-added tools to help attract and retain top talent. Employees often pay 100 percent of the premium on these voluntary benefits through payroll deduction. Many of these benefits can be offered to family and friends as well. It's up to the employee; it's their money, and it's not costing the employer anything.
How can companies determine if adding a voluntary benefit program is the right choice for them?
They have to look at the true cost of running a company. Adding a voluntary benefit program can help offset those costs for them. Many companies are looking to ways to cut costs in the health insurance arena. It is extremely costly to maintain these major benefits. Often, what these companies are doing, ultimately, is passing those costs on to their employees.
Most voluntary benefit programs will help reduce that cost to employees because of the unique system of these benefits. If employers decide to lower their cost of mandatory benefits by passing some of that cost on to their employees, the employees can then offset those costs by participating in, for example, auto and home insurance programs saving them money over the traditional coves they would shop on their own.
What should companies look for in a voluntary benefit program?
You want to choose a company that can provide access to a variety of types of voluntary coverage and choice for your employees in the plans available. The last thing you would want to do is to present a variety of new benefits to your employees, only to have them ultimately be confused about the different types of coverage, from different sources and the costs of each one. You will want to work with a company that can provide a powerful, effective and simple voluntary benefits package that will be communicated clearly to your employees to achieve the highest level of participation and acknowledgement of the added perks.
What is the benefit of having several policies within the same voluntary benefit package?
Simply put, the renewal process for any benefit plan can be extensive to research and implement at the term of each and every policy, not to mention having to do that multiple times across multiple carriers for multiple plans. That is a huge migraine in the making just thinking about it! By having your plan developed and presented in a unified way to your employees, you will not only save administrative costs communicating these benefits, but you will also save time and money when it comes time to renew.
If you have additional voluntary benefit questions, please do not hesitate to contact our office to learn more!
Employers Get Creative with Tight Budgets....
Voluntary benefits are on the rise, but why is that the trend we are seeing? The economy is in recovery, but it is and will continue to be a slow climb up a very tall mountain. Company belts have not loosened and with the overall impact of healthcare reform still uncertain, it still may be quite some time before they let those belts out a notch or two.
According to HR Daily Report, this is why more employers are looking at Voluntary Benefits as a lower-cost incentive to attract new and retain existing talent. Employers are taking to offering employees everything from auto and home insurance to legal plans or even pet insurance. All of these being growing trends in employers looking to stay competitive. That's the assertion at a recent presentation at the 2011 Health Care Benefits NY conference. Outlined in the course of that presentation was a list of the most popular group voluntary benefits, now and in the future.
Most popular now included:
- life insurance
- disability (long and short-term plans), and
- vision plans
- long-term care
- legal plans, and
- auto and home insurance
- Because it provides protection against lost income, disability insurance (short and long-term) is perhaps the most popular voluntary benefit today.
- The financial security afforded by life insurance makes it an especially popular voluntary benefit in uncertain economic times. While term life is still most prevalent, a "fight to qualify" among employers and employees is making permanent life insurance more popular.
- Voluntary dental insurance holds great appeal to both employees and employers because you can design plans so that it is not very expensive.
- Relatively new among voluntary benefits, supplemental limited-benefit plans that provide a set dollar amount per day for hospital stays are gaining popularity, as are gap insurance policies that pay a certain amount up to a deductible.
- More targeted in their coverage, but also appealing, especially to small businesses with high-deductible plans, are supplemental accident insurance and critical illness insurance.