Employee Portion of Health Insurance Premium

System

I have tried searching and reading through the many posts in this forum regarding FMLA however, I still am unclear about the following:

Our company pays a large portion of the Insurance premium monthly however, our employees are responsible for a small portion each pay period. I have a staff member who will be using FMLA. Do I require her portion of the payment for her health insurance up front? I guess I am trying to look at all options here to present to the President. This is a long term employee 11 years, she is a single parent and will very likely need all of her leave for a cancer surgery.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I am trying very diligently to keep the personal aspects out of how we handle the situation however we are family owned business which allows us the opportunity to offer more than is required by the law.

System

There was an article in a recent issue of HR Hero Line about this subject. You can read the entire article at [url]http://www.hrhero.com/hl/020108-tip-premiums.html?forum[/url]

Also, you can search for past Hero Line articles and other information in the free area search of HRhero.com at by clicking on the search button in the top navigation bar. There is even an option to search the free area and forum with just one search.

You can search for articles in all the past issues of all 50 Employment Law Letter newsletter using the Answer Engine on the subscribers page as well.

Hope that helps.

Wendi

NaeNae55

We have an fsa premium plan, so all premiums are pre-tax. We talk to the employee and try to arrange for the expected premiums to come out of their checks in the time period preceding leave. That doesn't always work, but if you have plenty of notice it can really help things along.

Sometimes employees are gone longer than expected or have no time to give lots of notice. In that case we keep in touch with the employee. When they have a lot of time off and have not prepaid any, we request that they pay their portion on an after-tax basis. Most times the time period involved is one month or less though, so we just catch them up when they return.

On a few rare occassions the employee did not return. If they somehow had not made all their payments, we termed their insurance as of the last date of paid coverage. This usually happens soon enough to avoid the insurance company paying any claims, but if they had already paid some claims, they just requested refunds from the providers.

If I were you I would check with my carrier to see how they would feel about you calling up May 15th to say an employee's coverage dropped April 1st. Knowing how they will handle things will go a long way towards helping you make a decision.

Hope this helps.

Good luck!

Nae

joannie

We require paid leave to be used first and continue withholding their deductions. I include a sentence in the FMLA paperwork that says" if you wish to keep your insurance benefits in force you will need to pay the premiums due by the normal payday for each pay period in which you have no accrued wages or paid leave.

NeedCoffee

We give our EEs a choice, which occurs while filling out the FMLA paperwork...they can either send us premiums payments while on leave, or the company will continue paying the premiums for them (the EE then re-pays premiums when they return to FT duty). I realize there is a risk the company takes in the latter option, but we feel it is worth it.

Most employees take option #2 - I have only had 1 person choose option #1. So far we haven't had any problems re-couping premiums. Since FMLA requires you to maintain their health coverage, it just seemed a logical choice for us.

Good luck!

System

Thank you for all your input. Just and fyi.. we are going to allow this ee to catch up when they return to work! I agree it is the best option and since my ee's are responsible for only 6% of the premium it is not that great of a risk. x:-)