University Health Alliance

As recounted by Del Mochizuki, director of finance and human resources at University Health Alliance, UHA was founded by a group of physician-teachers at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine. Having seen firsthand the ways the insurance and health-care system could be improved, these professionals stated their mission in launching UHA was to bring a simpler, more caring approach to employee health insurance.

“Being founded by physicians is something we are very proud of,” Mochizuki says. “We believe in taking care of our patients and our own people, and so we have a generous approach to benefits and compensation. We offer things such as ‘wellness time’ to our associates, in the form of two-and-a-half hours of paid time off per week that can be spent doing wellness-related activities—anything from going to the doctor’s office to walking to the local farmers’ market.”

Mochizuki says the same idea of providing a more responsive, humanistic experience holds true across the company’s internal operations, including in its provision of retirement plan benefits to its employees. For example, when the plan committee added after-tax and in-plan Roth conversion features about two years ago, employees received solid education about the new options, and many took advantage of these further ways to save ,.

Besides leveraging annual automatic escalation, the committee reaches out quarterly to all employees saving less than 10%, encouraging them to increase their contribution to take full advantage of the match—and sooner rather than later. The communications provide a link embedded in the email, making it easy for participants to log in and increase their saving rate.

Working with Empower as the recordkeeper, UHA has indeed achieved impressive stats within its retirement program, says Shawna Christiansen, managing partner of RetirementDNA LLC, who serves as the UHA plan’s adviser.

“UHA offers a generous match and profit-sharing contribution for employees, totaling 9% of compensation for those participants who save 10% or more,” Christiansen observes. “With an average savings rate of 10.1%, most participants save 19% toward retirement with their employee and employer contributions combined. Through all of COVID, there was no suspension of the match or the profit-sharing contributions.”

The UHA plan has what Christiansen calls an “excellent” participation rate, at 98%, and a “great” average balance of $134,798.

Mochizuki says a significant part of this success stems from the fact that UHA directly pays all plan fees except for the investment manager cost—including all recordkeeping, advisory, third-party administration and even Certified Public Accountant fees. The weighted average investment cost is 0.34% with a mix of index and actively managed funds.

“The investment lineup utilizes either the least expensive or most efficient share class; any revenue remaining is rebated back to participants, giving them the lowest investment cost available for the options in the plan,” Mochizuki adds. “We also complement the investment lineup with financial wellness resources and retirement-focused planning support. With the help of Shawna and her firm, we have designed our plan to empower people and to have a sense of control over the future.”

In a demonstration of its engagement with the investment menu, the UHA committee recently conducted an analysis of the capital preservation fund made available to participants. The project required waiting out a put period for the fund’s existing option, and, during the process, UHA agreed to pay a higher per-head cost to utilize an option with a better crediting rate while maintaining good wrap coverage, book-to-value ratio and low fees. This analysis and project resulted in $9,000 in additional annual returns for participants invested in the capital preservation option.

“Compounded over several years, this [has] a pretty big impact for employees,” Mochizuki says.

Christiansen commends UHA for seeing the COVID pandemic and the emergence of its remote-first working environment as an opportunity to provide quarterly one-on-one education and advisory access to its employees.

“The embrace of digital meetings was a small blessing in disguise from COVID,” she says. “The use of Zoom and Teams has really opened up the amount of engagement with employees. Despite the pandemic, we have been able to maintain and deepen these connections over the past several years.”

—John Manganaro