Benefit Categories and Integrated Partners

Objective: Explain why certain plan models (mostly voluntary) may not be available for many integrated partners.

What: As part of the EASE client migration, we recently added new benefit categories to the Employee Navigator platform. Our established API framework does not yet support these categories, so we have removed the ability to create the below plans for majority of our integrated carriers.

• Supplemental Life
• Voluntary Critical Illness
• Voluntary Dental
• Voluntary Vision

Why:  Ease’s voluntary plans are identical to the non-voluntary plans with the exception that there is no need to add employer contributions to voluntary plans.  The issue is that when these “voluntary” plans are integrated with the carrier, the carrier does not know what to do with the “voluntary” dental, for example.  To the carrier it is just “dental”.  This will require some of the carriers to update their integration. 

How does this affect brokers: Brokers will need to rebuild plans under different categories to integrate or use the correct carrier's name if they want to integrate these plans

Solution:

Do not use the Plan types above unless the employee can enroll in 2 different plans.  For example, if an employee can enroll in 2 different dental plans at the same time.  THIS IS NOT COMMON.

Example: Group A offers two vision plans, one with Guardian and another with Principal with the intention for employees to be able to enroll in both policies at the same time. The group planned to accommodate this by setting up the Guardian plan as “Vision” and Principal as “Voluntary Vision”.

In this scenario the “Voluntary Vision” plan would be unsupported on the Principal integration since this does not currently align with Principal’s current API configuration.

Our team is working with our carrier partners to add support for these plans models as part of our Ease parity initiative.  

Please reach out to us and let us know the group’s needs if you have any questions.