A Health Spending Account (HSA) is a group benefit that an employer can make available to its employees to cover eligible healthcare related expenses. Qualifying expenses are governed by the Canadian Income Tax Act. Need to know if an expense is covered? Checkout this handy table of eligible HSA expenses.…
We live in interesting times when it comes to insurance technology (insurtech). According to cbinsights.com, in the United States alone, more than $2.56 billion has been invested in insurtech startups in 2018! Huge investments are being made in projects and programs to change an industry that has been traditionally dominated by manual processes and paper. Benefits administration in particular is one area in which tech investment is long overdue. Over the past few years the Canadian market…
Administering employee group benefits plans directly with insurance carriers, or through many ben-admin modules in HRIS platforms, comes at a cost. Some obvious, like a lack of robust data compliance built into these systems, which results in liabilities in the way of plan member data errors. Some, less obvious but still significant, like: the lack of robust data retention.…
In previous articles we covered various third party administrator (TPA) topics including: what a TPA is, and how some TPAs can lower the cost of administration. This article looks at how a TPA can streamline group benefits administration for your company while also giving your company the opportunity to offer best-in-class benefits to your employees. The most common way in which a TPA can increase flexibility is by offering a centralized, robust employee benefits administration system that…
The true cost of an employee group benefits plan is more than the plan’s premium. The plan must be administered, and administration is a time consuming, inefficient, and costly part of employee benefits. Benefit plan admin is usually a process of never ending paper chasing for enrollments and other forms, while maintaining a wall of post-it note reminders of important dates as well as an excel sheet to cross reference against insurance company admin websites and invoices.…
For years, Third Party Administrators (TPAs) have been the norm in the United States. Their ability to knit together insurance carrier products to make best-in-class benefit packages while controlling costs, along with the administration and billing efficiencies they bring, have made them the obvious choice for managing employee group benefit plans. Although TPAs have been around for a long time in Canada they have only recently started picking up steam…