Friendly Reminder: We Don’t See Your Bills

Here at United Agencies, we pride ourselves on providing the best possible service to our clients. We love to help!  To borrow a phrase from one of our Producers, “We love insurance, so you don’t have to!”  But sometimes there are things that we either can’t help with, or where we need your help.

So let’s talk about auditing your bills.

We know.  It’s the worst.

Here’s what we do for you behind the scenes at renewal: 

• The month after your renewal changes have been processed, the new rates are in place, all of the new enrollees have been added, and the census has been updated, we audit your bills for you.
• We request a copy of your billing statement 2 cycles after open enrollment, then compare that with the plan and dependent choices we captured from your employees. This is a time-consuming and very important step for us.  (*We want to make sure we got it right.*)  It’s also the best time for us to catch any mistakes because we still have time to go back and correct them at the renewal date.
• Carriers have become much more stringent in the last 5 years about backdating changes (much to our disappointment), and that inflexibility can be problematic for us when we realize someone is on the bill, but oops…. they haven’t worked here in 5 months.  Things happen!

After that, we rely on you. You might not be aware of this, but Carriers don’t send us your bills!  We don’t see them, which also means we don’t see if the day-to-day changes that we process, are getting on those bills.  We DO follow up to ensure the changes we are processing, have taken place.  But the bills are the final frontier.

 Tips to keep your bills squeaky clean:

• If you have a new-hire, keep an eye on them to be added to your bill 1-2 months after their effective date (depending on how quickly the Carrier processes them).
• Same goes for a termination.
• If you have an employee with a qualifying event - a new baby is the most common - please make sure that new baby is showing on the bill 1-2 months after their effective date.

We’ll do the heavy lifting for you once a year at renewal, with our audit.  During those in between months, we really appreciate your assistance in keeping a close watch over any changes or adjustments that might have taken place.

Together, we can hope, and dream, of keeping those Carriers accountable, and make sure you don’t get burned.

Source: United Agencies Archive, Mar. 24, 2022