mixed messages

[cellio]

It's benefits-enrollment season at work. The web site is predictably slow and flaky, but after having key pages time out several times, I've finally got a stake in the ground. You can make changes up to the deadline so I figure "choose something now, review in more detail later" works better than being part of the last-minute crunch.

My costs for the main health plan and for the dental plan are both doubling (comparing apples to apples as much as possible). On the other hand, the long-term-disability insurance I pay for now will be covered in full next year. I, um, don't know what message they're trying to send there -- getting sick is more expensive but if you get really sick we'll cover you? Probably not what they intended.

(I assume that their actuaries simply optimized for the lowest corporate expenses traded against offering benefits employees won't rebel over, and there is no deeper meaning. But oh, the subtext!)

Comments

[metahacker]

are both doubling

Holy carp, Batman!

[goljerp]

Dental insurance doubling: dang. I mean, the thing about dental is by doing that, they're basically encouraging people to skip regularly scheduled cleanings, which means they're more likely to have emergency work done to fix cavities, which means unexpected absence from work, which is bad for business, right? In any logical world, you'd at least have "basic cleanings covered" insurance for all employees. Sigh...

(My own employer went from "no employee contribution to dental" to "small dental cost" recently, so I just dropped it... because Joy has a half-decent dental plan through her union which I can use.)

[magid]

Plus there's the whole "teeth and eyes aren't actually part of your body" aspect to having separate dental and vision coverage. Which bothers me more than insurers, clearly.

Doubling employee contribution is pretty sucky.