1) Group insurance rate changes for July 1, 2021: Beat the rush!
If you have already submitted your group insurance rate changes for July, thank you. If not, immediately complete our Group Rate Premium Change form ASAP and email it to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us.
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.
For guidance on this form, see our Group Premium Change Form Instructions. Important note: To ensure new prices are applied to the correct plans, forms for updating existing plans require the proper carrier codes or the form will be returned as incomplete. To locate your carrier code, look up your plans in MyTRS > View Insurance Premium Rates and the carrier code for each plan is displayed in the Insurance Plan column, in parentheses.
After we complete your rate change request, we will send you an email 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; verifying your requested changes will prevent a data entry mistake 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 email us at insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us, with a subject of “RATE ERROR FOUND,” and we will prioritize processing.
The annual processing of July insurance rate changes makes this one of the busiest times of the year for you and for us. 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 are withheld.
Need a refresher? Watch our Retiree Insurance training video, or reference guides listed on that page.
2) Reminder regarding “Premium Holidays”
The MTRS does not process short-term rate breaks, one-time rates or premium holidays as a policy since 2015.
If your insurance carrier is offering such a break, we encourage that you coordinate directly with your carrier to facilitate the premium refund.
If your premium “holiday” is equal to exactly one month’s premium, you can enter it manually for your retirees by signing into MyTRS, entering a stop date on each retirees’ deduction and immediately entering a new rate line 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.
3) Setting up brand new retirees for insurance deductions: We “enable” the insurance setup in MyTRS for new, soon-to-be retirees when we receive their retirement applications
When we receive a retirement application for a soon-to-be retiree, we “enable” your ability to set up their insurance in MyTRS. Accordingly, you do not need to email us before you can set up new retirees for insurance deductions. However, 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—you will need to send an email to our insurance updates box, with a subject of “ENABLE RETIREE.”
Questions?
If you have any questions, please send them to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us.