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The ins and outs of spousal carve-outs

For the vast majority of employers that have a better than average health plan, the largest cost problem (i.e., up to 30% of health plan costs) facing them stems from the fact that they’re covering more than their fair share (i.e., 50%) of those employees who have a working spouse who can access to their own employer-sponsored health plan. Unfortunately, most employers that have this large cost problem aren’t even aware of it because they’ve never had their employees complete a questionnaire that would have revealed this problem.

During my presentation at Workplace Benefits Mania, we’ll use a case study to illustrate how a broker can coach a client on cost savings strategies. Our case study is an employer that has 500 employees in their health plan. They’re providing health care coverage for 80% of the working families who have access to two employer-sponsored health plans, which resulted in this employer’s portion of health plan costs being 19% higher than they would’ve been if they only covered 50% of these families. This extra cost amounted to more than $700,000 for this employer in the last year alone. We’ll examine four cost savings approaches that will enable this employer to reduce, nearly eliminate, or more than eliminate, this enormous cost problem.

Snow will be speaking at the Workplace Benefits Mania conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, July 29 at noon about: The Ins And Outs Of Spousal Carve-Outs. To find out more about WBM, hosted by EBA’s parent company SourceMedia, click here.

Snow is president of S.M. Snow & Associates, Inc. and can be reached at: scottmsnow@charter.net.

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