Know Your Benefits by Cheri Kemp It never hurts to remind employees about certain aspects of our group health care plan. During meetings in Janu- ary, we announced some enhancements to our coverage to benefit our employees and provided handouts with this information. Handouts are available in each breakroom along with information on a variety of health plan options. After a lot of due diligence, we have been able to identify two preferred provider hospitals that when used, our em- ployees reduce their annual deductible from $750 to only $250. Those Tier 1, or preferred, hospitals are: • KSB Hospital in Dixon and their medical group • OSF St. Anthony in Rockford as well as the medical group We have also identified providers that we have been able to remove the deductible and co-insurance completely when services are received at these facilities. These are: • Forest City Diagnostics in Rockford for MRI, CT, PET Scans, ultrasounds & x-rays • Quest Diagnostics in DeKalb, Sycamore and Rockford for lab work • Rockford Gastroenterology Associates for routine colonoscopies We will continue to look for additional facilities to add to our Tier 1 coverage that will provide great quality and service at a reasonable cost to our employees. Tax Breaks, Politics & the Image Game by Jeff Meiners The tax break that went into effect for 2018 for corporations is real…our tax burden as a corporation has been reduced by about a third. That is a huge deal for us and will help us to be a more aggressive company when pursu- ing new business opportunities. The scramble for corporations to establish and document moral high ground on how they will handle this windfall has been interesting to watch. I’d like to point out that I should be a better student of understanding today’s world. I watch the news for a half hour in the morning, get some information from MSN on my computer and still read a paper daily. However, I find that I am much more content to watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory than to watch the news for long. I grow very tired of newscasters interpreting the news for me and telling me what I should think and most of the stories just make me mad anyway (pretty sure I am officially an old fart). This is a long way of leading into the fact that most of the coverage regarding how American corporations are treating the tax increase just annoys me. Announcements have been made by numerous large corporations with much fanfare through press releases about bonuses being paid to employees from the money gained by the tax reduction. We’ve consistently paid bonuses to employees over the past 30 years and a huge national corporation does it once and it is a major news story. Turns out those bonuses were paid at the same time a major layoff was being done…but the press release looked really nice. Are we doing a bonus based on the tax refund? No, but we do look forward to being able to pay both our profit sharing and annual bonuses at the end of our fiscal year in August based on our collective performances as a com- pany (we’d be dissapointed if we weren’t able to). We hope to be able to pay a bonus at Christmas time as well if business is good. We’ve done all of these for each of the past 30 years – not because of any program from our political leaders, but because we as a group of people working together did our jobs well and produced good results.
6 Crest Ink April, May & June 2018
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