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little meaningful commonality among each participating employer's
participation in the Prime Plan.
Contrary to petitioners' assertion, our interpretation of
the term "10 or more employer plan" does not make surplusage of
the phrase "experience-rating arrangements with respect to
individual employers". The phrase has meaning, for example, when
a multiple employer trust maintains a single pool of assets from
which all claims could be paid and charges each group of
participants a different premium. If one were to look solely at
physicians and construction workers, two of the vocations of
employees covered by the Prime Plan, and assume that the turnover
rate of these two groups is different, the Prime Plan, if
structured with a single pool of assets, would almost certainly
have to charge different premiums to the different groups based
on each group's turnover rate in order to lure them into and
retain them in the plan. In the context of the Prime Plan,
however, a single pool was simply not desirable because
prospective participating employers did not want to accept the
risk that their contributions would be used to pay the severance
claims of other employers' employee groups that possessed
different levels of severance risk.
We find additional support for our interpretation in the
testimony of Charles C. DeWeese, F.S.A., M.A.A.A., an expert on
multiple employer plans, who concluded that each Employee Group
was a separate plan. Mr. DeWeese testified that the typical
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