For employers
We make the software your broker uses to administer your benefits, which means we’re not the ones you should be talking to. But we’ve administered thousands of open enrollments, and the employers who get the most out of theirs are the ones who show up with better questions.
Here are the ones worth asking. If your broker has good answers, that’s a good sign about your broker — not about us.
Abra is listed among the third-party administrators available to help employers assess CHOICE Arrangements, the new federal name for ICHRA. CMS states: “Inclusion in this list does not constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) or any agency of the United States federal government.”
You’re welcome to contact us and we’ll answer your questions. What we’d rather do is work alongside your broker than around them, so our first suggestion is usually to bring them into the conversation — we hold no broker license, we won’t write your coverage, and we’re not looking to replace the person who advises you. If you don’t have a broker, or yours isn’t ready to explore this arrangement yet, we have partners who know it well and we’ll get you to them.
Start a conversationA traditional group plan is one way to fund employee coverage. A level-funded arrangement is another. An individual coverage HRA is a third, and it has only been available since 2020. A good broker can tell you which of these your group actually qualifies for and why they’re recommending the one they are.
Hourly and salaried. Full-time and part-time. Seasonal staff, or employees in another state where your carrier’s network is thin. These can be separate benefit classes with different contributions or even different funding models. Many employers assume it’s all-or-nothing because their platform made it all-or-nothing.
Ask specifically: who chases the people who haven’t elected, who keys the elections to the carriers, and who handles it when someone has a baby in March. If the honest answer involves your HR person and a spreadsheet, the technology isn’t doing its job.
Electronically, or by someone emailing a form? This is the single most common source of coverage problems — an employee who thinks they’re enrolled, a carrier who never received it, and a claim denied in month two. Your broker should be able to tell you, carrier by carrier, which of yours are connected.
Participation by class, who waived and why, what you’re spending versus what you budgeted. That information should be available to you on demand, not by special request, and it’s what separates a renewal decision made on evidence from one made on instinct.
Whether a specific pediatric specialist is in network is not a question for a chatbot or an HR generalist. It’s a question for someone who knows the plans and the market. Find out whether that person exists and how your employees reach them.
An individual coverage HRA lets you contribute a fixed amount toward coverage your employees choose themselves on the individual market, instead of buying one group plan for everyone. It became available in 2020 and adoption has grown steadily since.
Predictable cost, since you set the contribution rather than absorbing a renewal increase. Employees pick their own network and carrier. Distributed teams stop being penalized by one regional network. And you can offer it to some classes while keeping a group plan for others.
It shifts plan selection to your employees, which some workforces welcome and others find stressful. Individual-market options vary a lot by county. And there are affordability rules that interact with how much you contribute. It is not the right arrangement for every group.
None of this means you should choose it, only that you should have been walked through the analysis. If ICHRA has never come up in a renewal conversation, that’s worth asking about, and “I looked at it and it’s wrong for you” is a perfectly good answer to get.
A lot of benefits technology is sold on the promise of self-service: your employees handle everything themselves, your HR team stops fielding questions, and the platform absorbs the work. Some of that is a real improvement, and nobody misses paper enrollment forms.
But benefits decisions are among the more consequential financial and medical choices your employees make each year, and self-service fails quietly: an employee guesses, and nobody finds out until a claim is denied. The software should handle the administration completely, then make it easier for a knowledgeable person to help with the parts that matter.
That’s what we build, and it’s why we only work through brokers and hold no broker license of our own — we’re paid for software, and no part of our revenue depends on getting between you and yours. Your agency has the expertise and the relationship. Our job is to make that expertise faster to apply, not to substitute a help widget for it.
In most cases their compensation is already built into the premium you pay, so going without one rarely saves money — it just means nobody is advocating for you at renewal or answering your employees’ questions in January.
We hold no broker license and we take no commission on your coverage. Your broker pays us for the software they use to administer it, and that is the whole of our commercial relationship. If your current broker already uses Abra, they have everything described here. If they don’t and you’d like them to, tell them — that conversation goes better coming from you than from us. And if you don’t have a broker, or yours would rather not take this on, we work with partners who will, and the relationship stays yours and theirs.