Group insurance rate changes for July 1, 2019: Beat the rush!
Deadline reminder: For your July 1st group rate changes to be processed in time to be reflected in our retirees’ June 30th checks (in payment of the July 1st premium), you must submit them no later than May 31st.
If you have already submitted your group insurance rate changes for July premiums, thank you; if not, at your earliest convenience, please complete our group rate premium rate change form (available under Employer Forms, Reporting retiree insurance) and e-mail it to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us. For instructions on how to complete that form, see our recently updated Guided Practice 17: Group Premium Rate Change Form .
After we complete your rate change request, we will send you an e-mail notifying you that your request has been processed. Once you have been contacted, please sign into MyTRS and confirm that we entered your changes correctly; by proactively verifying your requested changes, you will prevent a small typo or oversight from becoming a large issue for your retired employees. (Please note that group rate changes are updated overnight, so you will not see the corrected rate until the day after we processed your changes.) If you discover an issue with the rate change, please e-mail us at insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us, with a subject of “RATE ERROR FOUND,” and we will give your message high priority in processing.
Please be assured that we will make every effort to enter group rate changes into MyTRS before our June warrant is processed and the deductions for July premiums are withheld.
As you know, the annual processing of July insurance rate changes makes this one of the busiest times of the year for you and for us. We thank you in advance for your cooperation and your patience.
Need a refresher? Watch our Retiree Insurance training video, or reference guides listed on that page.
Insurance deductions for soon-to-be retirees:
We automatically “enable” the set up for you
We “enable” the insurance set up in MyTRS for brand new retirees when we receive their retirement applications, so you do not need to e-mail us to request this
For existing retirees who are obtaining any kind of coverage for the first time or if it appears that we accidentally forgot to enable a retiree for you, however, you will still need to send an e-mail to our insurance updates box, with a subject of “ENABLE RETIREE.” This is also required for some existing retirees if they retired before we implemented the process of setting them up upon receipt of a retirement application.
Rate-wide premium insurance “holidays”:
You can process these in MyTRS
With direct access to retiree insurance functions in MyTRS, districts that would like to offer premium “holidays” can process them in one sitting
To reflect a premium “holiday,” simply sign into MyTRS, enter a stop date on retirees’ deductions and, at the same time, enter a new rate line to restart the deductions a month later. With this process, you have full control over the rate “holiday” and avoid any complications that batch processing can present.