Insurance Tips in Phoenix, Arizona

If you are a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. If you run a small to medium-sized company, your work never ends, maybe you’re a construction company and your out in the field every day with your crew, you might be a lawyer or CPA and run your own firm but are still working with clients day to day, perhaps you’ve grown your business to where your no longer working on the day to day operation of your business. Regardless, you are always looking at how to bring in new business, reduce costs and increase revenue. So what if you could save yourself thousands of dollars for just five minutes of work a month.

All you have to do is just spend some time every month checking your bill from your insurance carriers. Whether you do it yourself or have you HR or office manager take care of it it’s vitally important to check your bills every month. Let me explain why this is so important. Every carrier has different rules on how far back they will go to terminate an employee and refund the employer for that employees’ premium, for example, United Healthcare will go back 60 days while Blue Cross will only go back 30 days. And these mistakes can get expensive.

The average premium for a four-person family is about $1800 a month, let’s say that you terminated an employee that had family medical coverage, and let’s throw in dental and vision coverage as well, so tack on another $150 a month. Your office manager terminated them in payroll, removed their access to your companies’ systems, and got all the necessary paperwork filed, but they forgot to terminate their insurance coverage or let their broker know about the termination. Next month they check their invoices from the carriers, they notice that that terminated employee still shows up on the bill, so they contact the carriers, or the broker and no harm done, they’ll get that premium credited back to them on the next invoice.

But what happens if that office manager doesn’t review your bills, and your renewal and open enrollment are seven months away, it will likely be discovered at that point if your broker verifies your census vs the current enrollment at the carrier (ask your broker to make sure they do this). So now the carrier will only take them back two months so you’re stuck with the bill for 5 months of coverage, that’s about $10,000.

As you can see it can be very expensive to let a terminated employee stay on your plan, so it’s more than worth it to check your bill every month so that you can be proactive and catch issues before they can’t be fixed.

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