PLANSPONSOR - May/June 2024 - 16

CONFERENCE COVERAGE
Education and insights about
HSAs as employee benefits
Health savings accounts are a way to aid workers in meeting their medical,
financial wellness and retirement readiness needs. PLANSPONSOR held
its annual HSA Conference livestream in April to show plan sponsors
the role the accounts can play in helping participants-and the sponsors
themselves-achieve their goals. Speakers explained how HSAs work
and noted what to consider when selecting and implementing the benefit.
Below is partial coverage of the event; the full livestream is available on
demand at plansponsor.com/events/2024hsa/.
The Purpose of HSAs
Health savings accounts can be complicated
for participants, but plan sponsors
can combat the confusion with education
and access to informational resources, the
livestream conference panelists said.
Employers adding an HSA program
to their benefit offerings should have two
buckets, said Gregory Puig, a partner in,
and head of group insurance at, Sentinel
Group. One bucket is for the retirement
and health plans and the second, a " spend "
bucket, is for determining whether there is
overspending in match dollars and underspending
in the health plan.
Puig noted that the key to such a setup
working is for employees to be enrolled in a
high-deductible health plan and the related
HSA as early in their career as possible, to
enable them to build up savings.
" While having open enrollment,
[employers should] clue in their retirement
adviser, " he said. " Have the adviser and
the broker come together, covering some
16 PLANSPONSOR.COM May - June 2024
medical slides, and retirement slides. "
In the past, advisers would educate
participants with a focus on retirement.
But, Puig said, times have changed:
Participants
need
financial wellness
educators-advisers who are more holistic.
" We need people who are going to
understand the whole picture and help
people ask questions, " he said. " Because
the tools that we develop-virtual tools, AI
[artificial intelligence] tools, online tools,
mobile tools-they're great, but we know
that only helps X% of the population. We
still have a big piece of the population that
doesn't want to learn that way. "
Still, Michael C. Eldredge, HSA
investment product manager at Inspira
Financial, stressed the importance of an
effective digital outreach for overall engagement.
He said targeted email has been a
useful tool to encourage increases in HSA
adoption, investments and contributions.
" So far, we've engaged in email
targeting campaigns, which the employer
has to sign off on, " he said. " We try to
take the effort out of their hands. ... Over
time, we also want to have the user-interface
on the website include some coaching
and next-best-action type of interventions.
That's what we're evolving toward. "
Jake Spiegel, research associate at
the Employee Benefit Research Institute,
added that a plan sponsor should follow
up to see which outreach campaigns are
effective; Spiegel looks at how participants'
behavior changes after they learn their
employer contributed to their HSA.
" We find that people who have the
benefit of an employer contribution tend to
make contributions, overall, " he said.
According to Spiegel, the employer
contribution allows employees to accumulate
higher overall total HSA savings
while it takes a bit of the burden off the
workers. Additionally, people who receive
the benefit of a contribution are more likely
to invest their HSA. -Natalie Lin
Offering an HDHP
Before offering a high-deductible health
plan to employees-a prerequisite to
offering health savings accounts- plan
sponsors need to consider the pros and
cons, while
keeping in mind the demographics
of their particular workforce, said
conference panelists.
Leonard Spangher, vice president and
senior health consultant at Segal, explained
that an HDHP tends to be a lower-cost plan
option for employers, and it lets them pass
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PLANSPONSOR - May/June 2024

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