{{first name | Reader}}
The email came Tuesday with ACTION REQUIRED in the subject line, in capitals, which is the only part of it a person wrote.
Open enrollment runs from the 13th to the 31st. There is a portal. There is a guide. There is a webinar, recorded, forty minutes, which I will also not be watching.
Somewhere in the fourth paragraph there is one sentence everybody reads and nobody mentions.
If no action is taken, your current elections will roll over.
That is the whole email. Everything above it is scaffolding around permission to do nothing, and every year I take it.
I have been telling myself this is efficiency. Twenty-two years of the same plan means twenty-two years of a decision that was correct the first time.
I know what it actually is. I have just never needed a word for it before.
A RESIGNATION LETTER I WON’T BE SENDING
To: The Benefits Enrollment Portal
Re: Session timed out
Please accept this as my formal resignation from the enrollment process, effective at the close of the current window.
I want to be precise about the grounds. It is not the plan. The plan is adequate, and I have no complaint about it I could put in writing.
It is that you timed me out at eleven minutes while I was reading the document you instructed me to read. The document is forty-one pages. When I logged back in, the comparison table had reset to its default view, and my place in the PDF was gone.
I would also like to note that the password requirements changed since last October, that the change was not announced, and that three of the passwords I offered were rejected as having been used before. I am aware they have been used before. I used them here.
The confirmation email arrived in four seconds. It is the only thing this organization has ever sent me in four seconds.
I have elected to keep my current elections, as I have on twenty previous occasions. I would like it recorded that this was not a decision.
Regards,
DEEPLY UNSETTLING MATH
Twenty-two years. Twenty-two enrollments.
Two of them I thought about. The other twenty I clicked the button that says keep my current elections, which takes about nine seconds.
Twenty times nine seconds is three minutes. Two real decisions, twenty minutes each, is forty.
Forty-three minutes, across an entire working life, deciding how your family gets medical care.
ONE GENUINELY USEFUL THING: The three pages worth reading.
Not the wellness credits. Not the step challenge. Not the part explaining that your health is "a shared journey," which is in there somewhere in a lighter font.
Four things are worth finding, and all four are about what you are holding rather than what you ought to pick.
The date coverage actually ends if employment does. Last day worked, or the end of that month. Those are not the same, and it is not the same everywhere, so find the sentence in your own plan documents that says which.
Whether the plan year and any date you happen to be counting toward line up. They frequently do not, and the gap is somebody's problem. Worth knowing whose.
What happens to an HSA balance after you go. That is a question with an answer. Just not one I can give you, because it depends on your plan and your state.
Whether anything changes at a service year you are approaching.
None of this is planning to leave. It is knowing what you have got, which is a duller thing and a different one, and the only twenty minutes of open enrollment that has ever been worth anything.
PARKING LOT
Seventh one.
The window closes on the 31st. I will do what I have done twenty times, and so will you, and neither of us is going to bring it up again.
One question this week, instead of the usual ask.
What is the one thing about leaving that nobody has explained to you?
Hit reply. One line is plenty. I am not publishing it, and I am not collecting them. I want to know whether the thing I keep not writing would be any use to anybody.
Go do something that isn't work.
R. Countdown
ANY OTHER BUSINESS
Elections roll over automatically. No action is required. No action was taken.
Enough, Already Club. Form EA-1. Distribution: internal.
Retention: until you leave.