Pierce Group Benefits provides valuable, prompt and matter-of-fact compliance assistance to clients through direct publications, email alerts, webinars, seminars, and more.
Our compliance resource is comprised of attorneys and a staff of experienced subject matter experts who continually monitor regulatory developments to keep our clients up-to-date about new rules and how they are affected by
Pierce Group Benefits is committed to the health and wellness of your employees. We will work together to create a structured plan to help you develop, communicate and implement a Wellness Program designed especially for you.
We believe the mission of wellness in the workplace is to coach employees through various channels in self-responsibility and lifestyle behaviors that influence health and well-being, work performance, and health care throughout their lifetimes.
The Critical Illness benefit helps employees prepare financially for an unexpected life event. This critical illness benefit is designed to help fill the gaps in your health insurance and can provide benefits to assist the additional expenses such as deductibles, home health care needs, travel, loss of income, rehabilitation and childcare. This financial protection offers a simple way to strengthen your benefits package.
Some critical illness examples are:
Cancer insurance can help bridge the gap, providing additional coverage employees may need and helping you build a comprehensive benefits package to boost retention without boosting your company’s expenses. Cancer insurance provides benefits to help offset both indirect and direct cancer costs that may not be covered by an employee’s medical plan such as:
When an employee experiences a sudden covered accidental injury, accident insurance can help them offset unexpected medical expenses that aren’t covered by their medical insurance. Since benefits are paid directly, they can be used to cover things like co-pays and deductibles, making accident insurance a great complement to a high deductible health plan.
Unlike medical insurance, coverage can be entirely employee-paid, so you can offer more benefits without impacting your budget. Everyone wins:
Medical Bridge insurance provides benefits to your employees to help pay for deductible and coinsurance costs, as well as everyday living expenses. With Medical Bridge, insurers don’t wait on any other insurance to first adjudicate a claim, which means timely claims administration and less hassle for employees.
Medical Bridge provides benefits for hospitalization, outpatient surgery, diagnostic tests, doctor’s office visits, emergency room visits, ambulance transportation and other expenses due to a covered accident or covered sickness.
Medical Bridge is available in several plan options so employers and their employees can choose the coverage that best meets their needs.
FSA
A Flexible Spending Account allows participants to set aside pre-tax money in a designated account that can be used to pay for health care expenses that are not typically covered by insurance. Employees can select the amount to contribute for the plan year and have access to the entire contribution amount on plan effective date. The money is then deducted from each paycheck on a pre-tax basis lowering taxable income. It also can be used for employee, spouse and dependents, you can use the debit card to pay for eligible expenses such as:
HSA
A Health Savings Account allows participants to have a savings account with tax advantages that can be used in combination with a High Deductible Health Plan. The funds in the HSA account are accumulated in order to be used for eligible medical expenses by the account holder.
By using untaxed dollars in an HSA to pay for deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and some other expenses, employees may be able to lower their overall health care costs.
All of the money in an HSA (including any contributions deposited by the employer) is owned by the employee even if they leave their job, lose their qualifying coverage or retire. The money in an HSA never expires.
Our group presentations are supplemented by providing each employee a comprehensive benefit booklet which contains all the benefits available to employees. Pierce Group Benefits provides, free of charge, a customized benefit web-site and video that we build and maintain for each of our clients. Employees can access benefit information, claim forms, and provider directories all in one place. Many groups like to use these in new hire orientation meetings.
Pierce Group Benefits believes in communication and education and our team works with each client to create a long-term communication strategy that continues throughout the year; not just at open enrollment. We believe employees need to be communicated with on an ongoing basis to help them become better health care consumers and hopefully find ways to improve their mental and physical health for years to come.
During annual enrollment, our Benefit Counselors conduct group briefings at each worksite followed by individual enrollment sessions. During the group briefings we educate employees on each component of their benefit package, review health consumerism strategies for greater utilization and savings, and provide an overview of the enrollment procedures via an interactive presentation. During the individual enrollment sessions, we help employees evaluate benefits based on their needs. We provide each employee with a benefit statement illustrating the value of employer provided benefits as well as any employee contributions.
Pierce Group Benefits has designed its service model to benefit public sector employees. Our hands-on approach alleviates the benefits administration burdens from your Human Resources Department. We provide assistance with enrollment, new hire orientation, claims, compliance, and wellness throughout year. We pair these services with the best in technology to make things as effortless as possible.
Pierce Group Benefits has dedicated Account Executives that serves as the main point of contact for each of their assigned accounts for all levels of plan administrator customer service. Our account executives communicate with insurance carriers regularly and act as liaisons between clients and insurance companies, responding quickly to questions and requests. They are responsible for implementing the benefit communication strategy at open enrollment each year and also provide support with client wellness initiatives and help clients realize their wellness goals.
Our goal is to remove all administrative burdens relating to open enrollment from our clients. Our Account Executives will develop a communication plan based on your unique needs and will work directly with you and/or department heads to schedule and conduct open enrollment opportunities for all employees, taking shift workers and workflow into consideration to minimize any workday disruptions.
Pierce Group Benefits has invested in the IT staff and software to provide customized benefit administration solutions. Our enrollment software simplifies and automates the entire benefit administration process—all benefit enrollment activity and data is in one place, both core and voluntary benefits; and enrollment information is automatically transmitted to the insurance carriers. We provide a flexible system which accommodates your unique rules and requirements. We adapt to you, not the other way around.
Our internal programmers can easily tailor the software to accommodate almost any type of benefit plan in combination with any employer-specific business rules related to plan eligibility, coverage or cost. We configure the system for you, to work the way your organization works. We’ll build your implementation to handle your unique business rules, such as dual spouse coverage policies, domestic partner coverage, grandfathered eligibility groups, and any plan bundling or cross dependency requirements you may have.
Our process starts with a complete look at where your company has been, where it is today and where it wants to go tomorrow. Our experts will analyze claims data, and plan designs from your existing carriers along with industry performance data. While we assemble this data, we will be asking about your corporate goals, expectations and budget requirements. We’ll conduct employee surveys and analyze your demographics. From financial objectives to employee perceptions, we want to understand every aspect of your business where benefits are involved.
After taking a hard look at your past performance, present situation and future objectives, we will create a strategic benefit plan. We will share our industry trend projections with you and discuss how to best prepare today for changes that will affect your plans in the future.
Negotiation
Pierce Group Benefits has the ability to evaluate numerous plan options to find the best benefits for your organization. By maintaining strong relationships with numerous carriers we are able to provide solid, creative, cost effective proposals that meet your needs, not ours.
Yearly rate shopping is reactive – not proactive – and does little to impact real savings and build long-term value. Pierce Group Benefits works with our clients to create a plan that can produce immediate savings by eliminating waste and redundancies while building obtainable, long-term solutions year after year.
Claims Management
Our sophisticated analytics helps us dig deep into your real claims data, to isolate specific cost drivers that we can address with targeted solutions to help manage high health care costs. Altering plan design is one strategic solution we can implement after analyzing your data, but we take it one step further. With our plan modeler, we let you “test drive” potential changes, so you can see the impact of a change—before making any decisions. We can show you how your group’s health care claims compare to industry and regional norms, to identify cost and utilization disparities.
Data mining can provide plan sponsors insight into what is driving plans costs and through our plan management techniques, make effective changes through wellness or educational campaigns. This is an area where we excel. This process saves more money than any other strategy around plan management.
Protecting your income is vital and can be overlooked quite often. At Pierce Group, we work with North Carolina’s leading Disability Insurance carriers to make certain that your employees’ incomes are protected in the event of sickness or accident.
Short Term Disabilty (STD) and Long Term Disability (LTD) plans can be purchased separately or built to work in conjunction with one another
According to “Vision Care: Focusing on the Workplace Benefit,” published by The Vision Council in late 2008:
You may find it necessary to reduce or eliminate some components of their benefits package to meet budgetary constraints. But voluntary benefits, such as vision insurance, provide value to employees and have little or no added expense to you.