12 Questions to Ask Before You Accept Your Health Insurance Renewal

Twelve questions, broken into the specific ones to ask out loud.

Each of these twelve questions below breaks down into two specific ones to put to your broker, your platform, or your own team. Check off each one once you’ve asked it and have a clear answer. The score guide at the end of this document gives you a read on how many straight answers you’re getting.

If you don’t have an answer to a question yet, leave it unchecked until you get one from your broker or HR platform. An open question is more useful right now than a guess.

PLAN COST

1. What’s Driving This Year’s Rate Increase?

A renewal number without an explanation is not a number to just accept at face value, and can be explored and negotiated.

• Has the reason for the increase been clarified in terms of both the carrier’s overall trend increase and the specifics to your group?
• Has the renewal been broken out by age band and headcount change against last year?
• Was this year’s renewal increase directly related to the past year’s claims?
• Has the data behind the rate increase been analyzed and reviewed by your team?

PLAN DESIGN

2. Are We Comparing This Plan Against CHOICE Arrangement and Other Options, or Just Renewing It?

Renewing the same plan structure every year skips a comparison that might lower costs or fit the team better than what’s already in place.

• Was a pricing comparison requested for other plans alongside the current group plan?
• Does the suggested plan fit this year’s headcount and team structure, or does a different plan plan fit this year’s set up better?

VOLUNTARY BENEFITS

3. What Would Expanding Voluntary Benefits Save Our Employees?

Voluntary benefits like dental, vision, and life insurance raise the value of a package at low cost to the business, since employees typically fund most or all of the premium themselves. It’s one of the more overlooked levers in open enrollment, since building it out rarely touches the budget line that group medical does.

• Have the voluntary benefits been reviewed to see what’s included and what it costs?
• Has a small employer contribution toward voluntary benefits been weighed as a retention move, rather than dismissed as an added expense?

BROKER PAY + PERFORMANCE

4. How Is Our Broker Paid, and Does That Shape the Recommendations We Get?

Commission structures vary, meaning some brokers tilt recommendations toward whichever plans pay best, not necessarily the plan that best fits your business, without that influence ever being stated outright.

• Has the broker’s commission structure been confirmed, rather than assumed to be neutral?
• Does the broker have access to multiple group carriers, or only the one they recommended?

5. What Has Our Broker Done for Us Outside of Renewal?

Delivering a renewal figure is the minimum a broker owes, not the whole job. The value shows up between renewals, in how fast questions get answered and whether compliance changes get flagged before they become a problem.

• Did you review and assess support response times over the past plan year?
• Was the reasoning behind this year’s renewal recommendation requested in writing?

EMPLOYEE COMMUNICATION

6. Do Employees Understand What They’re Choosing?

Employees who don’t understand their options tend to default to last year’s plan or the cheapest-sounding one, and both tend to cost more later, either in coverage that goes unused or in employee’s dissatisfaction with their healthcare coverage.

• Were plan changes explained in plain language before enrollment opened?
• Did employees have the opportunity to ask questions before choosing their plan, before being given a deadline?

DEPENDENT DATA

7. Are Dependent and Beneficiary Details Current, or Did They Roll Over Unchanged?

This information tends to carry over year to year without anyone checking it against what’s true now. An outdated record isn’t an issue until a claim gets denied or a beneficiary payout goes to the wrong person, and at that point it’s no longer a five-minute fix.

• Was dependent and beneficiary information checked and verified for this year?
• Is someone on your team specifically responsible for catching changes (e.g. new spouse, an aged-out dependent, or an updated beneficiary)?

COMPLIANCE

8. What Compliance Deadlines Apply to Us This Year?

Compliance requirements don’t pause for a busy enrollment season. A missed filing tends to surface at the worst possible time and not during the week it was originally due.

• Have required notices, including the Summary Plan Description (SPD), Summary of Benefits and Coverage (SBC), and any ACA filings, been confirmed for this plan year and documented?
• Has someone on your team identified and documented the filing deadlines and processes in a calendar?

9. Has Our Headcount or State Footprint Changed Enough to Change What Applies?

Things like a new remote hire in a different state or enough growth to cross a filing threshold can change what’s required, and often, teams forget to update the compliance checklist to match.

• Has any change in headcount (new hires, layoffs, or remote employees in a different state) been checked against current filing requirements?
• If the business doesn’t track this in house, has a compliance partner reviewed the list?

ENROLLMENT PLATFORM

10. Can Employees Complete Enrollment Without Calling HR?

The platform employees use to enroll should reduce work for HR, not make it more difficult.

• Can employees navigate the platform on their own, without having to consult HR to get through it?
• Was your HR department particularly busy during last year’s enrollment, and did you properly gauge signup friction?

11. Do Elections Flow to Payroll and Carriers Without Manual Re-Entry?

An enrollment platform disconnected from payroll and carrier systems creates a second job for someone re-keying elections by hand. HR tools built to talk to enrollment data remove one of the more common sources of enrollment mistakes.

• Do enrollment elections flow to payroll and carriers directly, or is the process manual?
• Do missed elections or incorrect dependent information get caught before the deadline?

POST-ENROLLMENT

12. Who Owns Benefits Questions After the Window Closes?

Most benefits questions arrive after the deadline, once employees have had time to think through what they picked. Without a clear owner for that stretch, questions either go unanswered or land on whoever happens to be free, and new hires or life-event enrollments can slip through the same gap.

• Is a point person named for benefits questions after the enrollment window closes, not just during it?
• Do new hires and employees with a qualifying life event have a clear path to enroll outside the open window?

Your Score

Add up your checkmarks for these 26 questions and find your range below.

• 0–8 checked: Most of these questions haven’t been asked yet, or the answers so far don’t hold up. Gaps like these tend to surface later, as costs or coverage problems nobody caught in time.
• 9–17 checked: Solid ground is covered. The unanswered questions are usually where cost, compliance, or confusion creep back in unnoticed.
• 18–26 checked: This enrollment is being run on answers, not assumptions. Ask this same list again next year, since plan design, headcount, and vendors change.

Reality Check

If more than a few of these are unchecked, that usually traces back to a mismatch between the plan, the platform, and what the business needs this year. Employees with health coverage stay roughly twice as long, so how these questions get answered shapes retention as much as it shapes the premium. Talk to a Decisely benefits advisor to see whether a group plan, a CHOICE Arrangement, or CoreChoice fits your team best.