The Color of Money: Don't Ignore Open Enrollment

It's that time of year -- open enrollment for your employment benefits.

It's time to determine whether you want to stick with your current health insurance plan or switch to another. You may have to decide about your employer-provided life insurance or disability insurance or whether to sign up for legal or financial-planning services.

One thing you need to do for sure: Open the documents when they arrive in the mail or read the information online. It's a pain, I know, but too many employees do nothing at all, allowing their employers to choose for them, typically signing them up for whatever they had the previous year.

Only 40 percent of employees actively make a decision about their open-enrollment choices, even if they choose to keep everything they had the year before, according to Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting and outsourcing company. Do nothing and you may end up with no health coverage, said Sara Taylor, Hewitt's health and welfare strategy leader.

"We are seeing a trend of more and more employers who are saying, 'If you do nothing, I'm going to change what you have and either choose for you or provide no coverage,' " she said.

Employers that make the choice for their employees may give them a grace period to respond. But after that, workers may be stuck with their choices from the year before, Taylor said.

Who knows what will happen with the health-care reform effort now being debated in Congress? But we do know that coverage for many workers is going to cost more in 2010, no matter what. You can't afford to ignore your open-enrollment package.

More than four in 10 employers said they are raising deductibles, co-payments and co-insurance, according to another open-enrollment survey, conducted by the consulting firm Watson Wyatt.

Average health-care premiums are expected to rise to $9,120 next year from $8,607 in 2009, according to Hewitt. Increasingly, employers are shifting more of that cost to their employees -- including their share of premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, which are expected to rise to $4,023, compared with $3,656 in 2009.

If you don't take the time to read through your benefits package, you might miss some important changes. You may find that your employer has reduced the number of health plans offered. And this means you might have to switch physicians or pay higher out-of-network costs to keep the doctors you like.

Procrastinate and you could also miss some perks.

Watson Wyatt found that employers are offering gift cards, cash and discounted premiums to workers and, in some cases, their spouses for undergoing a health risk assessment or participating in smoking-cessation, weight-management or fitness programs.