NJ agency focuses on cost mitigation for its employee benefits clients
Building an employee census, shopping health plans and trouble-shooting enrollment-that used to be the heart of an employee benefits broker's activities.
But since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, employee benefits service has become just as much about regulatory compliance as premium calculations, says Tom Sharkey Jr., president of Meeker Sharkey & Hurley Insurance in Cranford and Bedminster, New Jersey.
Consolidation among health plans has reduced agents' and brokers' ability to shop for lower prices among a wide range of providers, he explains. Rates vary little among the shrinking markets, but plan design and the way plans fit corporate strategies are still important challenges. And compliance is critical.
How to help DC plan participants do more than just accumulate assets
Back in the heyday of traditional defined benefit pension plans, more than a generation ago, workers protected by those pensions knew, long before retirement, what their monthly pension payouts would be. Both their pensions and Social Security benefits were guaranteed, no matter how long they lived. Their retirement planning process was pretty simple.
Most retirement benefits today are provided in defined contribution (DC) plans. For participants in these plans, retirement planning is anything but simple. By the time they approach retirement-or ideally much earlier-they need to understand a number of complex risks that threaten their future income, including equity risk, interest rate risk, longevity risk and inflation risk.
