MyTRS—Employers can add and edit plan rates
As announced in April 2024, employers can now change insurance plan premium prices.
It is critical that you review our instructions and/or videos detailed below before processing changes.
Be sure to download our updated 2024 Retiree Insurance in MyTRS guide, which contains two additional chapters. Prior editions of this guide are out of date. If you would like a physical copy, email InsuranceUpdates@trb.state.ma.us to request a 2024 edition mailed to you.
Important changes in the guide include:
Chapter 2 – Retiree Insurance Guidelines
Chapter 12 – View Plan Rates
Chapter 13 – Add / Edit Plan Rates
Chapter 14 – Premium Rate Holidays
Again, it is critical that you review our instructions as we are observing:
- employers altering 2024’s plan prices (resulting in large inaccurate rebills for retirees),
- employers stopping plans and adding plans with stop dates,
- adding plans with a final price of $0.01 (which will result in a deduction for $0.01 for retirees for January), and
- selecting plan options that are not needed (which will result in plan menu options packed with useless options).
Retiree Insurance videos:
Our Core Fundamental
The basics of administration
Webinar on plan changes
Reports
Downloading insurance reports
Our new plan price change
View and filter plans
Adding plan rates
Our new individual retiree process
Initial coverage
Changing and correcting individual coverage
Cancelling individual retiree coverage
Viewing deduction history
Please visit our online training and guides page to view all our videos and to access our comprehensive training manuals.
Reminder: “Premium Holidays”
If your insurance carrier offers a premium “holiday,” we encourage you to coordinate directly with your carrier to facilitate the premium refund.
MyTRS cannot process short-term rate holidays with a price of $0.00. Employers can enter a rate of $0.01 for a month and then re-enter the correct rate for the following month the next day. Do not enter a series of months with different costs for every plan, as the billing complications may trigger unforeseen errors. If you want to add new rows to change any of your rates to $0.01 for a particular month, please wait 24 hours to add the new row with the restoration price.
If your premium “holiday” is equal to exactly one month’s premium, and $0.01 will not suffice, you can enter it manually for your retirees. To do this, perform a cancel function to enter a stop date on each retirees’ deduction, then immediately enter a change function to add a new rate line to each retiree to restart the deduction a month later. With this process, you have full control over the rate “holiday” and can avoid any complications that batch processing can present.
The process for entering rate holidays is thoroughly explained in Chapter 14 – Premium Rate Holidays.
Questions?
If you have any questions, please send them to InsuranceUpdates@trb.state.ma.us.