Your Help Needed: Employee-Paid Medical Premiums Data
If your cooperative has subgroups participating in the NRECA Medical Plan, we are asking for your help in collecting government-mandated data on employee-paid medical premiums by end of day, March 22, 2023.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) of 2021 requires group health plans to submit certain information about health care spending to the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury. As explained in the NRECA Employee Benefits Weekly article of February 8, one of these new reporting obligations requires NRECA to collect the total dollar amount of premiums paid by NRECA Medical Plan participants, including COBRA beneficiaries and retirees, during the 2022 plan year. NRECA will aggregate all amounts collected and report only the average premium paid per participant.
We are requesting that you provide the following information via a new Employee-Paid Premiums event on the Employee Benefits website:
The total dollar amount of NRECA Medical Plan premiums paid by your plan
participants during 2022, including COBRA beneficiaries and retirees, by subgroup
or a total for all subgroups, not a breakdown of individual employee amounts.
You can access the data entry event through the link or button above, or under Salaries and Payments > Annual Reporting > Employee-Paid Premiums.
To gather this data: premiums that were paid by employees may be accessible in your co-op’s payroll system. Amounts paid by COBRA beneficiaries and retirees may be tracked outside of your payroll system.
The total provided should NOT include any of the following amounts paid by participants:
- premiums for non-NRECA medical coverage
- deferrals for vision, dental, disability or other non-medical insurance coverage
- contributions made by employees to tax-advantaged accounts such as FSAs, HRAs or HSAs
Remember, you don’t need to itemize individual participant-paid amounts—NRECA needs only the total amount for each of your subgroups. NRECA will aggregate the information received and report only the average premium paid by participants to the government.
Again, we are requesting that your data be provided via this online event by end of day March 22, 2023. This will enable NRECA to meet government-mandated reporting deadlines.
Thank you in advance for your help. If you have questions, please contact the Member Contact Center at 866.673.2299 or contactcenter@nreca.coop.