I think it might be time to stop calling benefits "benefits." It seems such a positive name for something that has become so contentious and bothersome. I think I am recommending: "that stuff we help you pay for in lieu of more salary." To me that seems a lot more honest although I guess nobody wants:

Joe Exectuive
VP of That Stuff We Help You Pay For in lieu of More Salary

on their door. But really, although the eventual consequences of having benefits are often, well, beneficial, the day to day of electing and managing one's benefits is really becoming a hastle.

My employer recently changed up our benefits choices. Tonight, with my wife, I sat and chose from something like 9 health plans and more than 6 subsidiary plans (vision, dental...). At one point I actually had like five windows open on my machine and had to do a spreadsheet in Excel to calculate the likely costs over a year to discover that the more expensive choice was likely going to be cheaper at the end of the year.

If I was reading the information correctly.

And if they don't just up and change it again.

It always seems to me with any of these things that you can always get quite a bit of information, but you can rarely get the bit of information you really need to make the decision. In the end I guess it is like buying a car, as long as you feel like you got a good deal then you did ok. Except that in this case you won't feel that way when you have to go to the doctor and realize you made a poor choice at the end of a blizzard of brochures some time ago.

Is there some reason why if they know what my expenses and my plan were last year - or actually over the last five years - that they can't apply that data to all of the available plans and tell me which of the choices will be most effective if things remain pretty much the same? I would think that a computer could spit out all of that information, and that it would have the right records, prices, and idea about how to apply the charges. But no, for some reason I have to do a spreadsheet myself and hope for the best.

Right now I'm just hoping the choices come out to my benefit.