Watch for 2024 Group Program SPDs and SMMs on December 12

Your cooperative’s 2024 group summary plan description (SPD) and summary of material modifications (SMM) documents will be released to the Employee Benefits website starting December 12, 2023. Give the documents to current participants and beneficiaries no later than March 1, 2024, and to employees you hire during 2024 within 90 days of their hire date.

Next week, watch for a Message Center notification with a link to your 2024 SPDs and SMMs.

• If you built a new plan or made changes to an existing plan during annual renewal, you will receive an SPD for that plan.
• If you confirmed an existing plan without making changes, you will receive an SMM. However, if your co-op offers a high-deductible health plan with the non-embedded individual deductible and you confirmed the plan for 2024 without making changes, you will receive a 2024 SPD for your high-deductible health plan. This is because the non-embedded individual deductible increased in 2023 due to IRS requirements.

Before distributing your SPDs and SMMs, review them to ensure they correctly reflect your elections (e.g., eligibility, premium cost-sharing, deductibles, and coinsurance), even if those elections did not change from 2023. Also, ensure that the provisions described in the SPD(s) properly reflect your co-op’s human resources policies and procedures. If they do not, contact the benefits compliance team right away. When you acknowledge distribution, a step will ask you to attest that you’ve performed these reviews.

Visit the BA Guide for these resources to assist with your SPD and SMM distribution:

• A distribution checklist
• A list of recipients (along with an explanation of why your co-op gets an SPD or an SMM)
• Electronic distribution rules. If you choose electronic distribution, you must follow the 2002 rules
• The 2024 SPD updates list summarizes what is different in this year’s SPDs. It can help answer questions that your employees may have as they review their new documents. Note that the new location on the Employee Benefits website for all the plan’s drug lists (as noted in the SPDs and in the 2024 SPD updates list) will be in effect online starting January 1, 2024. 

Finally, acknowledge distributing each document using the Group Plan Documents page of the Employee Benefits website. You can simultaneously acknowledge distributing multiple documents that share the same distribution date. Also complete any older acknowledgements that are still outstanding.

If you have questions about your 2023 documents, call the group compliance team at 866.673.2299, option 7, or email group.compliance@nreca.coop.