Narrowing Down Necessary Benefit Riders:

When you are presented with a group of benefit riders, it can be tempting to include all of them for your employees. However, these riders can affect your monthly premiums and may not be necessary. How can you decide what you and your employees absolutely need and which ones are superfluous?

First, it is important to understand exactly what your insurance plan will cover. Once you are aware of any exclusions or areas that are lacking in coverage, you will be able to begin narrowing down your options.

Benefit riders are used to fill in these gaps and provide extra coverage when necessary. Example benefit riders include dental or vision, life, disability and additional coverage such as maternity or birth benefits.

Next, you will need to ask your insurance representative to provide you with a list of all of the available riders for your current plan, and what they will cost. Many riders will only increase monthly premiums by a few dollars, but if you add too many, these can quickly become expensive.

Once you have your list, you can begin to narrow down your options by seeing what your employees really need. You can do this through the use of questionnaires, or by simply asking them what they feel they need and keeping notes. You can then take these results and get an idea of their needs and what your base insurance plan offers. If there are areas that are not covered in your plan that were requested, you can start with these riders first.

After you have compiled your list, start with your primary needed benefit riders. For example, if prescription drug coverage is not offered by your base plan and this was requested by the majority of your employees, this would be the first rider you would add.

You can then work through the rest of the results from your questionnaire to determine which other benefits are important. If only one employee requested a dental benefit, than this would be the last benefit rider you could consider. If only one person needs this rider, and it would affect your premiums too much, you can explain this to your employee and provide them with information on alternatives.

Once you have ranked the benefit riders in order of importance, you can begin to finalize the process with your insurance company. They may be able to offer you a different plan once you have determined what is necessary or a better deal on the benefit riders that you chose. Be prepared, however, to pay the maximum amount of premiums for these riders, just in case.

If your employees cannot come to an agreement on which benefit riders are important to them, you may need to hold a meeting to further clarify the issue. You can present their options and educate them on what the riders will do to their monthly premiums and then ask for their results again. This can be a very useful way to further narrow down your choices.

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