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Combining Standalone and Health Assist for a Perfect Pairing
By: Benefits by Design | Tuesday October 12, 2021
Updated : Friday June 2, 2023
When it comes to providing employee benefits, there are a lot of options out there! Combining these two products, Standalone and Health Assist, can create a unique solution with coverage for all!
Diverse Workplaces Are Turning to Flexible Benefits Plans
Whether you’re implementing a benefits plan for the first time or have had one for years, the same thing is true: workplaces are becoming more diverse. The Canadian workforce now has five different generations working in it, giving rise to multi-generational workplaces.
Providing meaningful and effective benefits coverage for employees with varying values and needs is no easy feat. Thus, more workplaces are turning to flexible solutions that offer employees choice in how they use their coverage.
Standalone
Standalone is a Health Care Spending Account (HCSA) and/or Wellness Spending Account (WSA) product. This completely digital solution allows companies to offer health and wellness coverage to their employees while keeping within a specified budget. It also gives employees the flexibility to choose exactly what coverage they spend their allotments on, allowing them to put their money exactly where they need it to be.
List of Health Care Spending Accounts (HCSA) Eligible Expenses
HCSAs have seen a rise in popularity among Canadian employers in recent years as the ideas of cost-containment, flexibility, and choice become more important in multi-generational workplaces.
Health Assist
Health Assist is an individual Extended Health Care (EHC) and Dental Insurance product from Green Shield Canada (GSC), covering general health and dental expenses. They offer a range of products, from less coverage and lower co-insurance percentages, to more robust plans that offer higher co-insurance.
Paired with Standalone, this can offer employees a unique health and dental solution!
Watch our Product Lead, Claudia Verbakel, take a dive deep into the combination of these products!
Watch the Webinar
Get the Best of Both Worlds
Combining Standalone and Health Assist offers distinct advantages, as each product works to augment and top up coverage of the other. This allows for a robust, unique offering for employers with as few as one employee.
This combination allows coverage to go further, as Health Assist ensures there is specific coverage in place with its own maximums for each plan member and Standalone fills in gaps, augments, or tops up coverage when needed.
What’s Unique?
- Coverage for employers as small as one employee. Fully insured plans often have a minimum number of employee requirements, and are therefore not available to smaller companies. Standalone also does not have premium rate increases or renewals, and employers are able to set employee allotments, providing crucial cost-containment.
- Health Assist offers a wide-range of coverage options, allowing employees to select the plan that best meets their needs. This provides employees agency and a next level of choice in their coverage.
- An individual’s Health Assist premiums are an eligible expense under a Standalone HCSA. This allows employees the option to fund their individual health and dental plan through their HCSA, effectively creating an employer-funded individual health and dental plan.
- Tax deductible. Any amount the employer pays towards an employee’s HCSA is tax-deductible for the employer.
The landscape of today’s workforce is varied and diverse, and offering flexible employee benefits is becoming more and more important. As the war for talent continues to rage, providing the benefits everyone wants could be key to recruitment and retention.
Interested in learning more?
Download the Perfect Pairing One-Pager (PDF: 64 KB)
