Volatile employee populations, erratic work hours and a dynamic contracting environment produce challenges for contractors and their employee medical benefits programs. Maintaining enough work hours to keep employees whole and eligible for medical benefits from month to month can be difficult. The Contractors Plan understands the situation and has developed a concept called The Reserve that enables contractors to overcome these obstacles, keep employees on benefit and maintain contract compliance all while being good stewards of their employees' fringes.

Using the Total Fringe concept, employers gross all fringes to The Contractors Plan. The fringes are allocated across the medical benefits array based on employee benefit elections. However, for the first several months, excess is not flowing into the retirement or HRA "catch all," but is accumulating into a reserve account tracked on a per-employee basis. Once one month (or other period) of core medical premium is positioned in reserve, excess is then shifted to the employee's retirement account or HRA. Should an employee fail to accumulate enough premium in a given month to maintain eligibility for their core medical benefit, funds are drawn down from the employee's reserve account and the employee's core medical benefit is kept whole.

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