Drug plan costs are an ongoing concern for Canadian employers. Benefits Canada’s Face to Face Drug Plan Management Forum in Vancouver shows how plan sponsors out west are managing them.
I’m frequently asked what I believe to be the most significant issue impacting employee benefit plans today. Most people are expecting my response to be rising costs, particularly drug plan costs. They are therefore surprised when I say changing employee demographics. I absolutely believe that the changing profile of the workforce is the most significant issue impacting employee benefit programs today. And yet, it’s not an issue that is particularly well understood by many plan sponsors.
A lot of articles have been written lately about administrative services only (ASO) funding arrangements for health and dental benefits, specifically targeted at smaller-size organizations with fewer than 100 employees. There’s nothing new about ASO—it was a viable funding option long before I showed up on the group insurance scene 20 years ago.
In the United States, technology is improving the way employee benefits are managed and delivered by plan sponsors as well as the way they are marketed and sold by brokers, a new report reveals.
Equitable Life of Canada has just expanded its online options for submitting group health and dental claims by enhancing its existing EZClaim Online tool.
The single most unappreciated asset in the design and management of employer-sponsored health benefit plans is transactional-level claims data. In addition to the more obvious benefit of optimizing the financial performance of the plan, the less intuitive value of accessing and utilizing transactional-level claims data is its utility as a strategic planning tool and measuring return on investment. What makes the set of transactional-level claims data even more exciting in 2013 is the ability to more easily integrate drug claims (by far the most numerous and robust from a data perspective), with short-term disability and long-term disability data sets.
An executive from a well-known national third-party administrator recently commented how administrative services only (ASO) is hot these days. He further added that several brokers were selling ASO plans as the panacea for all the evils in today’s benefits environment and an instant road to rich discounts of up to 40%. While ASO plans may offer plan sponsors some degree of savings over conventional insured plans, the true benefits may lay elsewhere.
The American benefits landscape has been the birthplace of a number of concepts and strategies that have migrated to Canada: Targeted health population programs, wellness and prevention programs, and worksite health management all began in the U.S. With the high cost of healthcare, these programs and strategies are intended to reduce costs for employers, increase employee productivity and reduce the incidence of disability claims. A similar strategy which is gaining more attention in the U.S. landscape is benefits advocacy.
More employers in the United Kingdom are offering flexible benefits in an effort to increase employee engagement and attract and retain top performers, but many fail to measure the return on their investment, a survey shows.
As the labour market south of the border improves, employers are making their benefits packages more attractive by offering pet health insurance, one of the fastest growing voluntary benefits in the U.S.