How We Work with Your Organization
Any consultant can bring you the lowest price on specific insurance lines, and we can too. We’ll scan the marketplace and manage your RFPs to find you the best pricing and highest quality carriers. But we don’t stop there. With Proactive Benefits, we manage your benefits for you from A to Z and walk with you every step of the way. The goal is to take the burden off you as you rely on our 50+ years of public sector experience.
Strategy
Do you have a road map that identifies where your benefits plan will be in one, three, and five years? Due to annual budgets, many public sector organizations make benefit decisions on a year-to-year basis, and this can leave little room for gradual, structured organizational change. Let’s face it: public sector benefits are changing. With ACA, political shifts, an aging workforce… you are faced with new challenges that stimulate change in your organizational culture. When you work with your NIS Consultant, we will help you support that culture shift by planning cost control strategies that can be implemented steadily over time. These plans usually contain an employee education initiative that can help reassure employees who are worried about their benefits.
Sustainability
Many current benefit plans in public sector organizations are simply unsustainable over time given the current cost trend. The question is, what can you do about it? Handcuffed by bargained contracts or competitive forces, it’s easy to feel like all you can do is accept the status quo. But instead, you can move forward proactively: taking a look at the hard data and making decisions based on it, and building small, easily-negotiable changes over time that can be gradually incorporated. And we won’t just leave you stranded trying to make changes happen all by yourself. We partner with you at the negotiating table, on your committees, in front of the board or in the boardroom… whatever it takes.
Benefit Integration
It’s all about the health plan… or is it? When in crisis, we tend to spend our time thinking about the problem in isolation. But reviewing your entire benefits package and how benefits work in tandem with each other can be beneficial for your organization. You may not realize that your early retiree benefit package may be affecting your current rate increases on your Health Insurance. Or that you have a gap in your Long Term Disability plan that could leave you self-paying a claim for 20-30 years. Or that HRAs and supplemental plans can soften the blow of introducing a High Deductible Health Plan. When you work with your NIS Consultant, we look at your entire benefits package, including retiree benefits, and help you find solutions that support your overall goals and strategies.
Compliance
With all the political changes, ACA, bargained and non-bargained contracts, early retiree benefit liabilities… no one person can know all there is to know. Maybe your current broker or consultant has provided you with checklists and articles. And while those may address minor problems, you don’t want to read through 30 pages of compliance documents only to find it doesn’t apply to your type of organization. When you work with NIS, not only do we walk you through new compliance issues step-by-step, but we also translate them into your language. That is, we tell you how the new regulations affect your specific type of plan and which ones don’t apply. We can do this because our public employer experience spans over five decades! We are on top of the latest trends, solutions, and strategies just as all consultants are – but more importantly, we are in touch with the political atmosphere, budgetary constraints, and negotiations so unique to your world.
