Employee Benefits Blog

Around 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every single day, which means 10,000 more people become eligible for Medicare. If your human resources department hasn’t yet been inundated with questions from your older employees about Medicare eligibility, they will at some point — and soon.

After all, many boomers are choosing to work a bit longer than the standard retirement age of 65 for a variety of reasons — some are still physically able to work, so they’re taking advantage of it, others are trying to save more for retirement (because so many people haven’t saved nearly enough, if anything), and others just aren’t ready to give up their day jobs yet.

It’s possible that some of your employees have deferred Medicare eligibility because they haven’t actually retired yet, but some people who are still employed find it’s cheaper to take the leap into Medicare (and all its parts) than to stay on their employer-sponsored health plan (though many choose to enroll in both). That said, it’s not quite that cut and dry when it comes to those enrolled in health savings accounts (HSAs) through high deductible health plans (HDHPs).

Here are the things that need to be considered when an employee or covered spouse turns 65:

Medicare Part A

With the exception of those employees actively contributing to an HSA, there’s really no reason for them not to enroll in Part A, which covers hospitalization, home health care, care at nursing homes, and hospice care. As long as employees have worked and paid Medicare taxes during a minimum 10-year period of time (the period of time deemed long enough by the government), Medicare Part A comes premium-free (however, it does come with coinsurance). The situation gets a bit more complicated when employees who are ready to enroll in Medicare are also contributing to an HSA.

Editor's Note: This post is a follow-up to one of our most popular blog posts, "3 Great TED Talks in The Era of Consumer-Driven Healthcare (CDHC)". This post features new Ted Talks for fans of our past article to enjoy.

When it comes to the decisions we make, it can sometimes feel like we are strangers in a strange land. Our motivations are often a mystery to us. But researchers in the world of behavioral economics are able to give us some insight into what informs our decision-making and why it often defies logic.

Over the years, there have been some incredibly useful TED Talks that can help us better understand the human mind and the motivations that drive our decisions. As an employer who must consider the decision-making process of your employees, you too can gain some important insights that can help guide you in creating more effective employee benefits packages.

Here are five TED Talks which we consider to be some of the very best on this subject:

Everyone is looking for ways to save money on their healthcare costs — especially employers, who are shouldering a large portion of the burden when it comes to insurance premiums. If you’re looking into self-funded insurance options, you’re certainly not alone. Self-funding is surging in popularity among companies of all sizes, including those with as few as 50 employees.

Employers are drawn to self-funding because of the promise it holds to curtail costs, the freedom it provides to customize plans, and the desire to be unburdened by strict regulation. Regardless of whether or not you choose to move to a self-funded insurance option, it’s worth exploring this funding alternative so you can make the right decision for your business.

What is Self-Funded Insurance?

Self-funded health insurance is a form of employer-sponsored healthcare that doesn’t use traditional insurance carriers as a conduit for medical care. Instead, premiums are paid to the employer, which the company uses to pay for medical claims. Self-funding has traditionally been found in larger businesses, typically 1,000 employees or more, because they’re more likely to have larger reserves and cash flow to absorb a bad claim year than a small business.

The financial upside of self-funding is that employers get to keep any premiums which aren’t spent on claims. In a fully-funded environment, those savings are retained by the insurance company as profit.

The downside is that you’re opening yourself up to greater degrees of expense variability. In a low claims year, you’ll save money — but in a high claims year, you'll have to be prepared to absorb any overruns in healthcare expenses. Regardless, in our opinion, employee benefit expenditures should always be looked at over a multi-year time horizon. 

At some point or another, every human resources employee helps to facilitate a leave of absence under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). HR personnel can probably recite FMLA guidelines and regulations in their sleep, but the average employee is pretty much out of touch with what the law entitles them to, and quite often they don't realize what’s actually required of their employers.

FMLA rules are designed to protect both the employer and the employee. From an employee’s perspective, they’re able to take necessary medical leave without fear of losing their job. For employers, it helps them work toward the goal of true, equal opportunity employment for both men and women.

Every business owner is concerned about their company’s reputation. It not only affects their ability to attract customers, but also the talent they’re able to recruit. And these days, the internet is providing a much louder voice to a much wider audience, making business reputation management both more difficult and more complicated.

Ideally, you want current and former employees to leave shining endorsements of your company and all it has to offer, but the reality is that not everyone will do so. Whether your role in a company is one of ownership, leadership, marketing, or human resources, part of your job is to engage in business reputation management and luckily, the very same internet making the process more difficult has managed to provide some useful tools to help you out.  

The Role the Internet Plays in Company Reputation

One of the most positive things the internet has bestowed upon us is the ability to be more transparent. We don’t buy anything without researching it and reading every review we can find, so why would job-seeking be any different? People can read the company’s website, but let’s face it: what they really want is the inside scoop. They want the dirt. They want to know why employees leave, what they’re upset about, what they wish they could change, and how good the employee benefits really are.

If you’re like most HR departments around the country, you’re on the tail end of taking a bit of a breather in Q1, seemingly having just completed yet another fall open enrollment.

Our benefit hotline specialists fielded thousands of calls in Q4 of last year. We thought it might be helpful if we recapped some of the more popular questions and answers, some of which change from year-to-year while others are perennial favorites.

As you might expect, this year we fielded a considerable number of questions about High Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). We also took a considerable number of calls on Medicare, Limited Purpose FSAs and other hot topics.

Distributing these FAQs to your workforce or repurposing them in next year’s open enrollment communications and employee benefits guides should go a long way to helping reduce call volume into your HR department.

FREE GUIDE: The Top 55 Open Enrollment FAQs

Listed below are the first 15 on our list. You can access 55 more by clicking here to receive our downloadable guide.

More and more companies are choosing to forego the traditional method of funding health insurance and are instead opting for a self-funded insurance program. 

For many companies, this is a great way to reduce expenses because the employer gets to drop any collected but unspent premiums to the bottom line. (In a fully-funded scenario that profit would go straight to the insurance company.) That said, self-funding is also a gamble, since an employer can also experience a plan year in which medical claims are higher than collected premiums.

This is where stop loss insurance comes into play.

What is Stop Loss Insurance?

Stop loss insurance is essentially insurance for an employer’s self-funded insurance plan (the technical term is Reinsurance or Excess Insurance). It caps the amount an employer would be responsible for paying in the event of a catastrophic claim, or series of catastrophic claims.

Stop loss caps come in many shapes and sizes and are typically driven by the risk tolerance of the company putting them in place. Stop loss insurance can prevent you from ending up in a number of financially dangerous situations because of employee illness or injury, including:

• Decimating your budget (or your emergency reserves) for the year out of a need to cover employee healthcare costs.
• Being unable to pay employee healthcare costs, then finding yourself being sued as a result.
• Losing great employees due to the fact that you're no longer providing the coverage they expected (and used to receive) from their employer.

Even though the majority of the working population in America are parents, employers seem to be largely in the dark about how to cater benefits packages to people who are raising kids, especially working moms. Thanks to the openness of the internet and highly successful working moms (like Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook) talking about their experiences, a whole new avenue of conversation has started about making the workplace more family-friendly. The law provides a starting point, but there are little things (even free things) you can do to help make pregnancy and the return to work easier for working moms. 

First, a disclosure before I go on - I had a lot of help from my wife, a working mom of two children, when writing this particular article. She had a lot of thoughts about what she wished she would have had access to when our children were young and what employers could do now to make the return to work easier. With that out of the way, let's continue...

What’s Required of Employers by Law

Employers with 50 or more full-time equivalents are required to allow men and women to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave each year under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Most employers will allow their employees to use vacation or sick time during their leave so that part of the weeks are paid. Some even offer partially paid leave.

One of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act includes employer requirements for working moms who are still nursing. This stems from the scientific belief that breast milk, for the first year, is what’s best for babies, as well as the reality of breastfeeding — which is that it’s time consuming. Women are more likely to give up on breastfeeding if they don’t feel their employer is supportive of providing work breaks for pumping.

Employee morale can ebb and flow in an office environment. Sometimes dips in morale have nothing to do with actual work — it could mean people are struggling with personal issues and it’s seeping into their professional life. The trouble is, emotions are contagious. We start mimicking each others faces when we’re just hours old and it doesn’t stop in adulthood. At work, positive feelings can spread throughout your staff, just like negative ones — and both can spread through your work and impact morale.

If you notice that multiple employees are displaying negative behaviors (eye-rolling, sarcastic comments, reluctance to get work done, or coming in late), it may be time to boost morale at work. Boosting employee morale doesn’t have to involve a series of complicated incentives. Most of the time, it’s about providing some outwardly noticeable benefits that your workforce enjoys — the kinds of things they’d tell their family and friends about when boasting about the place they work.

With baby boomers starting to retire, millennials have become the largest portion of today’s workforce. For years now, employers have been asking themselves how they can attract and retain this elusive generation — crafting tailored employee benefits packages — and just when they think they’ve got the hang of it, Generation Z pops up.

Gen Z is also known as the post-millennials, the digital generation, and the iGeneration, but regardless of what you call them, they’re beginning to enter the workforce. Though they may be dreading the prospect, it’s already time for HR Directors to start thinking about what kind of employee benefits package will recruit a whole new generation.

Who are Generation Z?

The boomer generation is the only one with agreed upon dates recognized by the census bureau (1946 through 1964), but the media has spent plenty of time defining (and debating) the others. For the most part, people agree that Gen Z begins sometime between 1997 and 2001.

Some make the case for defining this generation as starting on September 11, 2001, in recognition of the historical event on that day which changed every facet of American life, including the way we raise our children. Without a doubt, Gen Z is being raised with an entirely different perspective on life than those who came before them.