Services

Exclusively serving Pennsylvania municipalities – Municipal Benefits Services operates exclusively for the benefit of municipalities in Pennsylvania that participate in the Trust and is managed by a Board of municipal employers and professionals.

Our medical, dental, and vision programs are self-insured, which creates significant savings to our members by avoiding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Health Insurance Tax (which could be as high as 4%+ in 2018 and indexed to increase for future years) and eliminating state insurance taxes, carrier risk and margin charges, etc. These taxes are built into all fully insured contracts and could add another 8% to 10% into the rates paid by an employer.

By pooling the groups together (both large and small), we are able to:
(1) significantly reduce administration costs, and
(2) more efficiently spread the financial and clinical risks across all participating employers.
This enables MBS to keep our rates low and stable for our participating groups year-after-year, covering the claims experience peaks and valleys of each group.

Our underwriting model is pure with rates determined by an independent actuary. MBS does not play games by ‘buying the business’ through providing significantly discounted first year entry rates through an arbitrary underwriting decision, hoping that the employer will stick with them to recapture the initial loss. In addition, we do not adjust our existing groups’ rates to match competitor’s rates that are usually discounted to ‘shadow price’ our groups’ current and renewal rates.

Excess reserves are credited back to our participating groups’ Rate Mitigation Accounts and not kept as a profit like an insurance company. These funds can be used by groups for (1) any approved medical program expense (e.g., wellness programs), (2) to offset premium costs, or (3) can be rolled over for future use by a group.

MBS owns and controls our data, not an insurance company. We actively manage this data through a state-of-the-art analytics warehouse to determine the clinical cost drivers of the Trust so we can deploy employer-specific strategies to control or reduce costs for our members.

MBS provides comprehensive health and wellness promotion tools and resources for our groups at little to no cost, including providing no-cost biometric screenings for employees.

MBS monitors and performs many of the ACA mandated administrative functions for our groups, such as preparing government filings, complying with employer mandates, providing tools and resources for monitoring full-time equivalents (FTEs), preparing ‘Cadillac Tax’ projections, etc.

Municipal Benefits Services provides local government municipalities with personalized benefit administration and assistance with government compliance. With fifty years of experience with municipal benefit services, we understand the challenges and complexities of municipal government.