Wellness Program - Multiple Premium Discounts, how to manage?

connie-heitman

Last year we implemented a new Wellness Program that has four steps and the full discount is $22 per pay. All that completed the first step are receiving the full discount at the start of this year. The second step must be completed by the end of March to keep the full discount or forfeit $7 of the discount. The third step is due to be completed by end of June or forfeit $7 of the discount and the final step is due by the end of September or forfeit $8 of the discount. Employees can fall into different premium discounts based upon which steps they complete or not complete during this year. One way to manage this would be to create different employee groups that apply to different rate tables. This would be many employee groups and many rate tables to maintain.

Is there another way that is efficient to manage the multiple premium discounts? Is there a field that HR could update at the employee level on their health plan that denotes amount of discount instead of pointing to a different rate table based upon which group is applicable? If you could share how you manage the multiple rate would be greatly appreciated.

juergen-erbe

We don't have the exact same scenario as you but close. We have a couple of surcharges that are applied as well as a wellness program discount that had two tiers of participation.

We decided to go with the employee groups/rate tables method.

Yes, that means we have a large number of groups (and thus rate table entries) dedicated to this as a result.

But, we put in effort to create an Excel worksheet that essentially 'programmatically' creates the information necessary to just enter in the base rates for our benefits, the various rates for each of the factors, and then creates a set of tabs that we can use to do an upload via add ins to populate. So after the initial setup and a yearly review to ensure everything is still matching the assumptions made in the worksheet, it's just updating the numbers and doing another upload.

[Updated on 3/9/2016 8:34 AM]