Become a Member
MMIA Employee Benefits Program Membership
Thank you for your interest in joining the MMIA Employee Benefits (EB) self-funded health coverage pool. When you join the EB Program, you enter into a partnership with 90 other Montana cities and towns. Together you experience stability in your health coverage costs and excellent health benefits designed specifically to meet the needs of municipal employees. MMIA manages this pool with the help of top-notch third party administrators (TPAs) and vendors to offer municipal employees high-quality coverage and stable rates.
Step 1
Requesting Rates (Typically takes 2-4 weeks)
MMIA will provide custom rates based on your city's/town's prior 24-36 months of claims data or completed employee health questionnaires. We will give you rate quotes for both your current plan (if you have more than 200 employees) and the MMIA menu of standard plans. MMIA has very low administrative costs and rates reflect what your group will cost the program based on your specific utilization.
There are three options to get a rate quote:
- 1-3 Employees - Standard rates
- 4 – 199 Employees – Each employee must fill out a health questionnaire. (Instructions found here.) Once MMIA receives all employee questionnaires, it will take up to 4 weeks to process them and return a quote to the city/town.
Health questionnaires will be handled confidentially. They will be placed by employees in a sealed envelope and returned to MMIA. MMIA will then submit them to Allegiance to begin the underwriting process, based upon which rates will be set. HIPAA will be strictly adhered to during this process. For more information, please see the instructions above.
For any groups that are large enough to get data for 12-36 months in addition to or instead of the health questionnaires, that helps to provide a better quote and can much easier than obtaining questionnaires from a large number of employees.
- 200+ Employees – Provide MMIA with 24-36 months of claims data from your current TPA or insurer. It typically takes 2-3 weeks from when we receive your complete data to provide a quote.
Rates will be given with a specific effective date in mind. Should your city/town decide to delay joining until after that effective date, new rates may need to be calculated with updated data or new employee health questionnaires.
Step 2
Joining the MMIA Employee Benefits Program
Your municipality must have already signed the MMIA Interlocal Agreement to proceed to step 2.
Should your city/town decide to join, you will need to:
- Pass a resolution
- Sign the Program Agreement and Large Claims Disclosure forms
- Complete the Group Election Form
The Group Election Form indicates which options your city/town will offer eligible participants.
- Medical – Choose to offer your custom plan (only for groups over 200 eligible employees), MMIA’s menu of standard plans (recommended), or a combination thereof. We highly recommend our members offer the entire MMIA menu of plans. We find groups that offer the menu see much higher participant satisfaction.
- Prescription – If you choose to offer a custom plan, that plan may include a custom prescription benefit. If you offer any of the MMIA standard plans, you will need to select either the MMIA percentage or copay prescription options. Whichever option you choose will apply to all participants.
- Dental and Vision – MMIA offers the option to participate in our self-funded dental (with or without orthodontia) and/or vision coverages. If you choose to offer either of these, you must have at least 80% of your eligible employees enroll.
- Basic Life and AD&D – Fully-insured life insurance through Unum. Employer paid. 100% of eligible employees must enroll.
Voluntary Term Life and AD&D – Fully-insured life insurance through Unum. Employee paid.
Some cities and towns allow elected officials to participate. There is a separate resolution for that they have to complete. Sample resolutions can be found below:
Step 3
Implementation (Takes 90 days+)
Once we’ve received the resolution, Program Agreement, Large Claim Disclosure, and Group Election Form, we will begin the process of implementation. Depending on the complexity of your benefit selections, this process can take up to 90 days or more. During this process, we will coordinate with you to build out benefit selections, set up the participant enrollment process and get participants enrolled. This will include coming to your city/town for in-person education sessions with employees and retirees. These presentations are critical to helping incoming participants understand any changes in their coverages, who MMIA is, and what resources they now have available to them.