A company group benefits plan has a lot of unknowns when it comes to employee usage. Elevated employee usage of the benefits plan increases your group benefit rates. These rate increases can impact your company’s fiscal planning and make the plan unaffordable for both the company and employees.

This is why Northern Financial Group has designed a solution targeted at adding certainty to your company benefit rates – fixed company group benefit rates until May 2021. Further, qualifying companies (with a minimum of 20 employees) get an additional 12 months of rate certainty. This means a company signing up for October 1^st would receive almost 3 years of known rates!

Naturally the question becomes; what happens after the rate certainty period lapses?

After the rate lock period the plan will perform like most group benefit plans. This doesn’t mean the rates will automatically skyrocket – your group’s rates will be based on the employee usage. This is similar to all group benefit plans including health care spending accounts – if the employees use the benefits above (or up to) the allotment, the cost is higher.

Also, remember that the rates cannot skyrocket above what the market deems to be fair. If the increase after the rate lock period was unreasonable we can use quotes from other providers to negotiate lower rates. If the negotiations were unsuccessful, we would simply help you move providers to a more competitively priced plan.

If you’re interested in seeing if your group qualifies please contact us.