1) Group insurance rate changes for January: Beat the rush! Please send your new senior rates to us ASAP so everyone’s changes can be processed on time
If you have already submitted your group insurance rate changes for January, thank you. If not, at your earliest convenience, please complete our Group Rate Premium Change form and e-mail it to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us. 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; verifying your requested changes 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 prioritize processing.
The annual processing of January 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 December warrant is processed and the deductions for January are withheld.
2) Setting up brand new retirees for insurance deductions: We “enable” the insurance set up 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 e-mail 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 e-mail to our insurance updates box, with a subject of “ENABLE RETIREE.” This is still required for some existing retirees if they retired before we implemented the process of setting them up upon receipt of a retirement application.
3) Reminder regarding “Premium Holidays”: You can process them 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—simply sign into MyTRS, enter a stop 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.
Questions?
If you have any questions, please send them to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us.