Jul 12, 2024
How Regimen Helps Rideshare Companies Distribute Prop 22 Healthcare Stipends
What does Prop 22 Mean for Drivers?
California Proposition 22 (Prop 22) is a state law that allows companies to classify rideshare and delivery drivers as independent contractors while providing them certain benefits based on work hours. Passed on November 3, 2020, it was created to counter California Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which required gig workers to be classified as employees. Major sponsors included Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash. Supporters highlight the flexibility and benefits provided to drivers, while opponents argue the benefits are inadequate.
Who is Eligible for Healthcare Benefits?
As a result of Prop 22, drivers who meet specific criteria are eligible for benefits from their respective IC+ companies. In addition to receiving a minimum wage and insurance, qualifying drivers are now entitled to a healthcare stipend. The requirements for these benefits, outlined in Prop 22, include straightforward metrics like working a minimum number of hours per week. However, to receive the healthcare stipend, drivers must have a qualifying health insurance plan. Determining the eligibility of such plans involves more than a simple yes-or-no check.
What documentation is needed?
The qualifications for these healthcare stipends involve several domain-specific checks, including but not limited to:
Primary subscriber matching
Employer-sponsored plan verification
Government-sponsored plan verification
To ensure a positive driver experience and provide ample time for corrections, companies need to adjudicate these documents quickly and accurately.
The Current Solution
Currently, companies are grappling with inefficient and costly methods to manage healthcare stipend distribution:
Costly API integrations: Many companies resort to expensive API integrations with health insurance vendors. While these can provide accurate information, they often come with high implementation and maintenance costs.
Onshored agents with high turnover: Some companies employ onshored agents to manually review and process healthcare documents. This approach, while potentially accurate, is labor-intensive and scales poorly with increasing driver numbers. Moreover, the repetitive nature of the work often leads to high agent turnover, resulting in constant retraining costs and loss of institutional knowledge.
Offshore labor with high error rates: In an attempt to reduce costs, some companies turn to offshore labor. However, this often results in high error rates due to the complex nature of healthcare documentation and potential language barriers.
These solutions not only strain resources but also risk negatively impacting driver satisfaction due to slow processing times and potential errors.
How Regimen Can Help
With over 1,000,000 app-based workers in California alone, IC+ Companies face the daunting task of adjudicating healthcare documents each quarter. The Regimen decision platform allows operations teams to define their business requirements in natural language, streamlining this complex process.
Key Features
Semantic Understanding: Automatically identify traits that were previously challenging to detect, such as employer sponsorship or primary subscriber information.
Operator-Friendly Interface: Configure rules using plain English, SQL, or even images, eliminating the need for specialized coding skills.
Convert SOPs: Automatically convert your standard operating procedures into configurations.
Seamless Integration: Connect Regimen to your existing systems through our robust API.
Comprehensive Analytics: Track compliance trends and gain insights through intuitive dashboards.
The Regimen Advantage
Beyond Simple Transcription: Regimen understands the structure and domain-specific concepts of your documents, improving adjudication outcomes.
Key Knowledge Retention: Reduce the impact of employee turnover by preserving domain-specific knowledge within the system.
Flexibility of Business Requirements: Empower operations teams to tweak and monitor adjudications as situations change and new information emerges.
Enhanced Document Processing Efficiency: Streamline document approval processes, reducing queue backlogs and increasing approval velocity. This optimization improves the driver experience with more responsive turnaround times.
Conclusion
Beyond just health stipends, imbuing domain knowledge into your document processing can significantly improve the driver experience. Regimen is designed as an operator-first product, enabling operations teams to scale their expertise and apply their knowledge at scale.
If you would like to simplify your document adjudication process. Please reach out to us at eric@withregimen.com or jordan@withregimen.com!
Additional Reading Material:
†: IC+ Companies: "Independent Contractor Plus" Companies are companies whose primary business involves independent contractors that are afforded extra benefits pursuant to California proposition 22. This includes Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Grubhub and many more.