Health insurance and employee benefits have been top-of-mind concerns for legislators, and those concerns are turning into a slew of new regulations and policies. While the intentions behind these rules and requirements are positive, they increase responsibilities and liabilities for employers of all types, Christian schools included.
The first major set of compliance requirements goes into effect Jan. 1, 2022.
New Benefits Transparency Requirements
The first element in this rollout is a set of new rules around pricing transparency in benefits. Employers must communicate their contracted benefits rates to employees, which means that your employees need increased access to the actual costs of the care they may receive under your plan.
The insurance network behind your benefits plan has all of this information and is the party setting and managing prices, but the responsibility for complying to this new rule is on the employer. You have to provide the right information to the right parties or risk being out of compliance.
If you are like most of our clients, your experience with getting answers from your insurance provider may be less than positive, making this particular obstacle significant for many organizations. Because of the complexity of your benefits plan and the potential scope of the information you need to gather and share with your people, complying with new transparency requirements should be a part of your rollout plan today.
If you wait until January, you are likely to encounter serious problems.
Planning Ahead for Painless Compliance
One of our team members has compared the torrent of new legislation to a tsunami. There is a lot coming, and you don’t want to get caught on the beach when it hits. If you plan ahead, you can put your school safely on the high-ground, entering 2022 with everything you need and all of the right processes in place.
In addition to the new transparency requirements, you should also prepare for the following:
- Compensation disclosure requirements for vendors providing benefits services
- New rules for surprise billing
- Reporting requirements for new plan RX data
- Mental health parity compliance
- Section 125 plan relief
- Exchange open enrollment and premium tax credit expansion
- COBRA subsidies
We practice what we preach, so the same preparation we are encouraging you to take is a part of our process with clients. We recently hosted an in-house webinar for our clients to walk them through the upcoming changes and to answer questions about how they might be affected. You are welcome to view the webinar to catch up.
And, as always, you’re welcome to reach out to us directly to talk through your exact needs. All of this is entirely manageable and solvable if we work together and start early.
