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After health insurance, the most important benefit an employer can offer, in my opinion, is long-term disability coverage. This is not a coverage that you can go out and buy anywhere. So, if I’m an employee and my employer doesn’t offer this to me, I have no way to go out and purchase at an Read More

Hi, this is Connie Chiara with Corporate Benefit Partners. Let’s talk for just a minute about healthcare reform and employee benefit plan compliance. Healthcare reform requires that employers provide a health insurance exchange notice to employees when they are hired. This notice describes the employee’s right to purchase coverage on the health insurance exchange. In Read More

Over my career, I’ve worked with a lot of different employers, and over time, the insurance marketplace has been at all different levels. It’s a growing trend now for employers who are very progressive in their viewpoint of attracting and retaining top talent to provide the very, very best they can in health insurance benefits. Read More

Hi, this is Connie Chiara with Corporate Benefit Partners. Let’s talk for just a minute about Employee Benefit Plan Compliance. Let’s face it, this can be a complicated topic, but one of the most important components of plan compliance are Employee Benefit Plan Notices. There are 12 all together. COBRA, HIPAA, FMLA, Medicare Part D Read More

When you’re looking at insurance broker services, it’s important to understand that they offer services for a lot of different things. So you have, first of all, their brokerage services, how they broker your business, how they approach the marketplace on your behalf. You also want to understand what kind of support services that they’re Read More

When you choose an insurance broker and you work with them throughout the year, you’re going to be in contact with them several times for all different kinds of reasons. Certainly during your open enrollment and your renewal time, you’re going to see that insurance broker several times and have several conversations. But throughout the Read More

Let’s talk about the distribution of health insurance. So if you’re Aetna, United, Cigna, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, how do you get your product to the consumer if you’re doing group insurance? The first thing I want to say is that they use the agency system to sell and service their products. So, unless Read More

Hi, this is Connie Chiara with Corporate Benefit Partners. Did you know that PCORI fees are due on July 31st? I know, right? What the heck is a PCORI fee? The Affordable Care Act requires health insurance issuers and self-insured plan sponsors to pay Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institution fees, PCORI fees. The fees are reported Read More

If you’re an employer group and you have a hundred or more employees and you experience what we call a significant renewal, a big rate increase. Let’s say you got a rate increase of 35, 40 percent. You had a big claim, something went wrong in your group, you’re fully insured, your insurance carrier gives Read More

Once you get over a hundred lives, probably around the 150 mark, insurance carriers are actually going to start to give you some claims information. So you’re going to be able to understand how much premium I pay every month and how much the insurance carrier is paying out in claims. And you’re also going Read More