The Canada Dental Care Plan will help make dental services more accessible for unionized employees who don’t currently have a dental program within their contract, says Sandeep Kakan, director of pension governance at Unifor.
Kakan, who until recently was the union’s director of pension and benefits, says the new program has established a standard from which unions can draw during the bargaining process when looking to add or expand dental services in contract agreements. Indeed, Unifor has been able to negotiate improvements in dental-care entitlements for members and their covered family members and even expand dental coverage by adding more types of providers.
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“We’ve been able to successfully accomplish protecting these entitlements across all economic sectors and over past consecutive quarters, . . . which basically means . . . we’ve been able to either increase annual limits, decrease copays, offer enhanced eligibility criteria and . . . [add] additional types of providers . . . in our contract. So, the [Canada Dental Care Plan] has been a positive development overall for all our Unifor contracts.”
By combining the national program with existing entitlements, the union can extend the eligibility criteria to workers’ dependants if they weren’t already covered. For example, Unifor has been able to negotiate that children up to age 18 who may not be covered under the government’s plan may get coverage under the employer’s plan.
In some cases, the union has been able to expand the annual limits to bring it in line with the federal program.
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“Having this . . . social program strikes up a conversation at our bargaining tables. These are baseline expectations that Unifor has consistently delivered in bargaining contracts across all economic sectors where dental programs form an integral part of each wage settlement, without consideration to any income-testing threshold.”
Similarly, the national pharmacare program provides a template that unions may be able to use to improve their members’ lives, adds Kakan. While qualifications for use of certain therapies can differ between provinces, he believes a single payer national dispensary that offers improved data collection analysis and recommendations with respect to evidence-based safety, high efficacy and overall effectiveness of each particular treatment will be the gold standard.
“Those . . . treatment plans can easily be adopted [and] templated off onto union contracts. There are other valuable knock-on effects, such as accelerated product approvals [and] enhanced predictability of product life cycles that meet the criteria of a national evaluation health agency making such recommendations. . . . This model can easily be templated into contracts where currently there’s a lot of ambiguity . . . particularly in the area of product and provider selection.”
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Employees can be subject to different drug evaluation agencies for treatment of certain conditions, including common ones such as diabetes, he adds, noting insurers may have differing viewpoints on the safety, efficacy and affordability profiles of treatment plans for the same health condition. There’s also ambiguity in product switching, grandfathering and the willingness to pay per quality-adjusted life-year threshold.
Kakan says the national pharmacare program can help to remove ambiguity and establish a uniform application for drug therapies with a patient-centric model. “The entire labour movement has an obligation to lift up the middle class, which, in essence, would positively impact societal and enterprise productivity. We champion social programs like dental care . . . that have knock-on economic effects [and] knock-on benefits for several industries across Canada’s economy. It’s not just about wages. It’s about the entire member — their families, communities and [our] society in Canada.”
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