Many employees know the value of taking part in their company-sponsored savings plan but unfortunately not enough. They know it’s a valuable tool to help them grow their retirement savings and prepare them for the day they will need to draw on those savings. Many company-sponsored plans are a good start for retirement savings but need to be supplemented with personal saving outside of the plan.
If you ask many plan sponsors and/or group insurers, disability plan costs are increasing at concerning rates. Disability plan costs tend to be somewhat variable—always have—but are we experiencing a fundamental change in the nature of the risk? What is the road ahead for disability plan costs?
The Federal Court of Canada has approved the settlement between the Government of Canada and the members of a class action regarding the Royal Canadian Mounted Police long-term disability insurance plan.
Ontario's budget, which received royal assent last week, included an amendment to the Insurance Act to prohibit the provision of long-term disability benefits in Ontario unless they're provided through an insured arrangement with a licensed insurer, according to a Blakes Bulletin.
By now, most employers are well aware that mental health problems present serious issues for the workplace. But even with greater awareness, employers are still challenged by what to do about it. Speakers at the 2013 Mental Health Summit held recently in Vancouver presented a host of ideas for improving how employers deal with mental health in the workplace.
Many of us unfortunately know someone who has experienced a traumatic event. It could be an unexpected event like a sudden death, diagnosis of a terminal illness, a workplace accident resulting in serious injury or death, a car accident, a robbery or act of violence, or a natural disaster. Generally, people who have either directly experienced or witnessed a traumatic event will report feelings of unpreparedness, powerlessness and helplessness. For those managing a person who has been through a trauma, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with the situation and effectively help the person affected.
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.
The federal budget remained fairly silent on employer-provided benefits and healthcare provisions, but one quiet note in the document could play into future considerations for employers that self-insure their disability plans.
Banyan Work Health Solutions Inc. has announced a new program to help manage workplace absence. The program, part of Sun Life Financial’s absence and disability management group benefits, provides employers with access to an occupational claims management service.
The Ontario government has changed its mind and now intends to give ex-Nortel employees the choice to opt out of a windup plan for their pension and enlist private financial institutions to manage the pension fund. Finance Minister Dwight Duncan informed the group that the province plans to introduce legislative amendments that would give Nortel […]