"The absolute worst thing you can offer in a retirement savings plan is choice."

I won't tell you who dropped that little bombshell on me a few weeks back, except to say that she is a senior executive at one of the public sector pension funds.

The word used most often was "choice." Young plan members want to choose the benefits that best suit their needs. Plan sponsors want to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own health and better appreciate the employer-sponsored benefits plan.

Lay a foundation of critical illness insurance, and then let plan members choose between vision care, vacation credits or whatever strikes their fancy. Dr. Arif Bhimji, consulting physician for At Work Health Solutions Inc. in Concord, Ont., describes it as a "movement to defined contributions as opposed to defined benefits."

Having just returned from our Defined Contribution (DC) Plan Summit in Banff, Alta., where there was no shortage of angst on the subject of plan member choice, Dr. Bhimji's description gave me a bit of a start.

As any DC plan sponsor will tell you, offering choice means educating plan members about those choices. That is a major challenge for DC plan sponsors.

Educating health benefits plan members will be every bit as difficult. Maybe more so, given people's tendency to believe that they will remain healthy. How many of those young plan members will make sensible decisions about dental coverage when it means saying no to extra vacation days?

None of this is to say that choice is a bad thing. Choice in a health benefits or retirement savings plan does empower the individual plan member. And it does give them a clearer sense of what their employer is providing them.

But as benefits plan sponsors go down this road, they would do well to ask for directions.

We are accepting nominations for the benefits canada Silver Anniversary Lifetime Achievement Awards. Our goal is to recognize three professionals who have helped shape this business over the last 25 years. We will present one award in each of these categories: employer-sponsored health benefits, employer-sponsored pensions and pension fund investment.

E-mail your nominations, along with a quick paragraph on your candidate or candidates, to kpress@rmpublishing.com. The deadline is April 1 at 5 p.m.