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Employers that contribute to multiemployer health plans typically offer rich packages of benefits, but some may have big coverage gaps.
Hints about the gaps show up in a new report on the plans' Form 5500 filings. Analysts at Horizon Actuarial Services and the International Foundation of Employee Benefits Plans prepared the report.
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About 61% of the 1,480 multiemployer plans in place in 2020 offered dental insurance, vision care and life insurance along with major medical coverage.
Roughly 65% of the multiemployer plans offered disability insurance.
But the percentage of plans missing a key benefit was 12% for dental insurance, 18% for vision care, 26% for life insurance and 35% for disability insurance.
Related: DOL releases 2024 Form 5500 for 401(k)s, informational copies now available
The size of the apparent coverage holes varied widely by sector.
For dental insurance, for example, the percentage of multiemployer plans missing the benefit ranged from just 6% for service industry plans to 14% for construction industry plans and 18% for plans in the "other sectors" category.
The "other sectors" category included plans for communications workers, agricultural workers and educators.
Disability insurance gaps also varied widely, with disability benefits missing at just 30% of construction sector plans but absent at 46% of entertainment sector plans and 49% of "other sector" plans.
What it means: Interpreting the percentages in the Horizon/IFEBP report is tricky because some employers that pay into multiemployer plans may offer their own, single-employer plans for certain types of benefits.
But, for benefits advisors and insurers, the report suggests that even some big plans that look as if they have everything may have holes in their benefits menus.
For benefits managers, the report may be a reminder that disability insurance needs more respect.
Multiemployer plans: The kinds of plans included in the new report help U.S. employers that are subject to sector-wide collective bargaining agreements feed contributions into plans for all participating employers in a sector.
The report: The analysts who prepared the report started with the Form 5500 reports that multiemployer plans filed with the U.S. Labor Department from 2006 through 2020.
Members of the public can get big, hard-to-manage files containing the plan data from the U.S. Labor Department. They can get more easily analyzed versions of the data from sources such as Judy Diamond Associates.
The files show detailed coverage information for each multiemployer plan in the data.
The Horizon and IFEBP analysts found that the number of multiemployer health plans was down from 1,496 in 2019 and down from 1,811 in 2006.
About 5 million active workers and retirees participated in the plans in 2020. That was down from 5.1 million in 2019 but up from 4.8 million in 2006.
The number of active employees in the plans held steady at about 4 million throughout the study period.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
