(Off Topic) Raytheon retirees open enrollment

[Dennis Kane]

I apologize for this being off topic, but it’s pretty important. They are shutting down the legacy Raytheon Benefits Center and replacing it with alight.com, specifically http://www.yourtotalrewards.com/rtx

Also, United Health Care has been replaced by Anthem. Your only choices are that as an HSA provider and Kaiser as an HMO, the latter limited to their provider network.

The deadline to enroll is 11/24. I am working on a comparison between United and Anthem, just to see what changed. The comparison is somewhat moot since you no longer can choose United.

Again, sorry for the off topic message.

Dennis Kane,
President, MacHACers

[M Coplin]

Dennis, maybe everyone is bcc’d on your email.
FYI,
Boeing is changing all pension and savings to Fidelity Jan 1, 2022.
I can’t even find retiree discounts.

Marge’s iPad Pro;-)

On Nov 22, 2021, at 8:24 AM, Dennis Kane <denni...@gmail.com> wrote:

I apologize for this being off topic, but it’s pretty important. They are shutting down the legacy Raytheon Benefits Center and replacing it with alight.com, specifically http://www.yourtotalrewards.com/rtx

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[Allison Sheridan]

To make this on topic (tech and security), here’s some advice. You have to create an alright.com login and set up FIVE security questions.

It is best security practice to lie in your answers and record your lying answers in you password vault. It is far too easy to find out where you went to hitch school or your first dog’s name. Social media has been collecting this information on you for more than a decade.

You can use your password manager to create the lying answers as gibberish, or I use a web service https://xkpasswd.net and push the “security questions button at the top and “generate passwords” at the bottom. These will be much easier to type than gibberish.

Allison

> On Nov 22, 2021, at 8:25 AM, Dennis Kane <denni...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I apologize for this being off topic, but it’s pretty important. They are shutting down the legacy Raytheon Benefits Center and replacing it with alight.com, specifically http://www.yourtotalrewards.com/rtx

[jlla...@verizon.net]

Outsourcing is an industry trend.  AT&T did the same thing a few years ago, driven by corporate desire to cut costs and enabled by technology.

Alight was formed in 2017 from spinning off and rebranding the benefits outsourcing department of Aon Hewitt through a private equity arrangement by Blackstone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alight_Solutions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aon_Hewitt

Alight, in turn, outsources services to other companies, e.g. 401K plan to Fidelity, medical insurance to Anthem BCBS, discount programs to ...

The following articles provides some insight:

https://www.northeastern.edu/graduate/blog/what-is-digital-hr/

https://www.aihr.com/blog/back-to-basics-what-is-digital-hr/

https://www2.deloitte.com/dk/da/pages/human-capital/articles/digital-hr.html

This is part of a larger societal trend for services to be provided online with little personal interaction.  I recently had an auto claim and USAA pushed me off to Coparts, an online vehicle auction company headquartered in Dallas.  Online companies can provide architectural and landscaping drawing using workers in India, and other companies provide a bidding process from which you select the one you prefer at a pre-determined price.

An other driver is risk mitigation, achieved by monetizing the risk.  In general the service provider absorbs the risk, which is offset by a markup buried within the service fee structure.

Companies like Blackstone have exploited society's acceptance of the new workplace and the technology that enables it.

What is lacking is the personal connection, working with someone with whom you develop a relationship on more than just business terms.

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: 'M Coplin' via MacHACers <mach...@googlegroups.com>
To: denni...@gmail.com
Cc: 'Bradford Miller' via MacHACers <mach...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Nov 22, 2021 8:31 am
Subject: Re: [MacHACers] (Off Topic) Raytheon retirees open enrollment

Dennis, maybe everyone  is bcc’d on your email.
FYI,
Boeing is changing all pension and savings to Fidelity Jan 1, 2022.
I can’t even find retiree discounts.

Marge’s iPad Pro;-)

On Nov 22, 2021, at 8:24 AM, Dennis Kane <denni...@gmail.com> wrote:

I apologize for this being off topic, but it’s pretty important. They are shutting down the legacy Raytheon Benefits Center and replacing it with alight.com, specifically http://www.yourtotalrewards.com/rtx

Also, United Health Care has been replaced by Anthem. Your only choices are that as an HSA provider and Kaiser as an HMO, the latter limited to their provider network.

The deadline to enroll is 11/24. I am working on a comparison between United and Anthem, just to see what changed. The comparison is somewhat moot since you no longer can choose United.

Again, sorry for the off topic message.

Dennis Kane,
President, MacHACers

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[ricksss96]

 I’m also in the Boeing (retiree) group that changed over to alight this year. Be sure to follow Allison’s advice creating your alright.com login and security questions. If you eventually have login problems its almost impossible to get help by calling their 800 numbers. Recently tried to log on to their ‘Worklife’ website as a new user to verify next year’s health plan changes and could not do it. Calling the help lines was no help at all.

Next years change by the pension and savings plan to Fidelity can only be an improvement. The existing Boeing-run website has never been very clear or easy to use. Have had several decades experience with Fidelity managing those types of plans and they are excellent.

If anybody wants to continue this discussion outside of the MacHacers group, please include me in.

-Rick

[Mario Obejas]

Oh man, where to start with this giant Alight communications Cluster*uck.

First, ObSecurity note (thanks Allison):

Yeah, wrt security questions, either

a. lie,  or

b. at least tack on a 6 char padding (prefix, suffix or in the middle) in truthful answers so that what you type in doesn't match the giant surveillance file stored on you.

I use Bitwarden as my credentials keeper, after LastPass decided to change their terms. It works well, is open source, and there are only a few oddball pages where Java wizardry/excesses prevent the autofill from working correctly (Alight being one of them ....).

Back to the Alight switch:

My theory: somebody saw a "cost saving" in a spreadsheet, pitched it in PowerPoint, the committee congratulated itself - and here we are. Assumptions were made about Alight's basic communications competence, which clearly didn't pan out. Hey Joe, what's a retiree? I never got a notice, paper or email, and I was consciously expecting it since the window was open for only two weeks last year. And I'm hardly alone. Most of us crowdsourced crucial details by getting the most basic info - like the gateway login - from a non-official source(!!!). In my case, a "Raytheon Retirees" and a "Hughes Aircraft- Where are they now?" FB page. There are even people  posting they received an official written notice that "our info won't be uploaded in time" to sign up for the before the deadline.

It's a sufficiently widespread Cluster*uck that they've extended their deadline. Check it out, fresh from the "Gateway":

"Annual Enrollment Period has been extended and you have through Dec 15 to complete your enrollment."

Second:
Respectfully, Dennis, the Kaiser info you gave is incorrect. It is a Kaiser HSA plan, not the HMO edition, if you are referring to the pre-65 offering. Specifically, the "Pre-65 Retiree Medical Kaiser South CA Gold HSA". I'm signed up for it, I've been in Kaiser for decades, both pre and post retirement.

Side note:

Raytheon switched us out of the Kaiser HMO years ago and into the Kaiser HSA. The complexity went up threefold - from a simple "copay and that's it" model, to the world of deductibles and additional after service billing in the non-HMO plan. Yeah, I'll take the HSA tax benefit, but not without harumphing about the complexity.

Marge wrote,  "Boeing is changing all pension and savings to Fidelity Jan 1, 2022".

Be thankful. Raytheon is going in the other direction, Alight is going to handle it.  Most of us retirees pulled our 401Ks out of RTN and handed them off to a major brokerage (like Fidelity). If you didn't, those accounts are getting transferred to Alight and their limited choices. See page 12 in the attached RAYSIP transition guide (also crowdsourced).

Hey, there's a new Vision plan via VSP. Did you see any detail on it when you were signing up? Me neither. Attached is what I grabbed from the Raytheon Retirees page. Since both Anthem and Kaiser offer a Vision exam, it's a question why you might want it? Answer: whether employee or employee with spouse, It gives a $175 allowance for frames at Costco. There's also lens and premium frame discounts. Effectively it's a 50-60% discount at already low Costco pricing, and Costco readily accepts VSP. I opted back in after getting the VSP info.

Life Insurance: Yeah it's offered. But you need to restate the beneficiaries. They know who your beneficiaries already were, but they make you reassign them. It's a critical little detail when so many people are posing the question, "Do I have to do anything if I don't change anything?". Oddly, they will still rely on them - it's official enough - if you kick the bucket within 12 months: "Any beneficiary designations you may have made on prior heritage company systems will not be transferred to Your Gateway, although will be relied upon should you die within 12 months of the transition without having made a beneficiary designation through Your Gateway".

Finally, where *and* how do we send our payments for January medical insurance? Yeah, no complete story there yet. It's being "developed". Attached is the crowdsourced Billing address for Alight, which is identical to an official communique I received in the mail yesterday. So, light a canle in the hoope that in the next 4 weeks they tell us how to pay for the benefits. Otherwise, my Plan B is to send a letter with a paper check equal to the sum of the three benefits monthly costs on the "Gateway".

[Dennis Kane]

Hi Mario,

(Again, I apologize for this being off topic. At least I am typing this on a Mac.)

Good to hear from you. Hope that all is going well. I referred to Kaiser as an HMO for two reasons illustrated in the screen shots attached to this email. First, they designate my GP, a typical UCLA doctor, as out of network. Anthem identifies him as in their network.

Secondly, the Alight site says specifically that Kaiser So Cal Gold is an HMO plan. I don’t think that HSA and and HMO are mutually exclusive. The former indicates that the deductible is high allowing you to have an HSA. The latter indicates the flexibility for the plan's in-network limitations. PPO’s are more inclusive than HMO’s.

This may be a different Kaiser plan than what you had in the past, or maybe the issue is retiree vs. non-retiree or maybe the site is misleading, but from all indications, Kaiser South CA Gold is an HSA and an HMO with a limited physician network.

Dennis