Insurable Interest Canadian Insurance Blog

Yaelle Gang, the Canadian Investment Review | May 15, 2020 The extent of fiscal and monetary intervention in the economy in response to the coronavirus crisis is likely to lead to deficits unlike anything seen before and result in asset prices faring better over the near term than the overall economy, said Bert Clark, president and chief executive officer of the Investment Management Corp. of Ontario, during a webinar hosted by the C.D Howe Institute on Wednesday. “While lower government bond rates may not get people onto planes or into restaurants, they can drive up the value of financial assets. One has only to look to the last 10 years to see the effects of sustained central bank involvement in the capital markets.” In the current environment, the IMCO is focusing on asset class diversification and ensuring it has enough liquidity, Clark said. “You cannot be a long-term investor if you put yourself in a position where you are a forced seller of risk assets in times of market strain.” Read: Building blocks of the Investment Management Corp. of Ontario Further, volatility is expected to continue. As a result, the IMCO has entered arrangements with specialist managers to buy high-quality, publicly traded assets during bouts of...

Staff | May 15, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic has prompted U.S. employers to make several changes to their health and retirement offerings, according to a new survey by the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. On the health benefits side, nearly all respondents (98 per cent) said they’re offering virtual health services, up 10 per cent from before the pandemic. And nearly half (49 per cent) reduced or eliminated virtual health cost-sharing to encourage employees to use it. In recognition of the myriad stressors employees are facing, 12 per cent of employers added virtual mental-health services to their benefits offering and nine per cent reduced or eliminated cost-sharing for those benefits. An additional six per cent relaxed or eliminated their eligibility requirements. Read: Drug plan considerations during the coronavirus pandemic The survey also found 35 per cent of employers have extended prior authorization periods for prescription drugs, 29 per cent increased quantity limits and 13 per cent waived prior authorization requirements altogether. On the retirement side, companies are looking at plan changes. Of the companies that provide matching contributions, two per cent said they had reduced the match and eight per cent suspended it. Nearly one in 10 (18 per cent) said they haven’t yet made changes...

Of course, the early rumblings of the coronavirus pandemic were already underway in the early weeks of 2020, but they were still very far removed from Canada’s reality. At the time of writing these words in mid-April, worldwide coronavirus cases had topped two million. It was estimated the number of employees working at home or part time had increased by 415 per cent. Employers were laying off staff and taking several other measures to ensure they remained in business. And global stock markets saw some of the swiftest and steepest losses in history. Read: Number of staff working remotely, part time up 415%: survey Without being too inflammatory or dramatic, the world we know has changed completely — and we have no timeline or map to follow to find our way back. Instead, everyone is stuck in limbo, adjusting to the new normal. For Benefits Canada’s readers, the workplace they were already tirelessly working to manage, support and grow has essentially imploded. Every component of their jobs pre-coronavirus is now covered with the fingerprints of this new culprit. We’re all employees and employers. And now, we’re all struggling with what the new reality means for us. Some of us are working...

Benefits Canada | May 15, 2020 While many Canadians can’t wait to start drawing down Canada Pension Plan benefits when they turn 65, it’s important to consider whether that’s the right move Bonnie-JeanneMacDonald, director of financial security research at Ryerson University’s National Institute on Ageing Delaying CPP is the safest, most inexpensive approach to receiving more secure retirement income. Yet 95 per cent of Canadians claim their CPP by age 65. Why does it matter? CPP benefits last for the rest of your life and keep up with inflation. More than 96 per cent of Canadians aged 60 will survive to age 70, and nearly 50 per cent will live beyond age 90. Waiting until age 70 to take CPP would bring those benefits to about 150 per cent of what they would be at age 65 and about 250 per cent of what they would be at age 60. Read: Why a little bit of retirement planning knowledge can be a dangerous thing My research has found most Canadians with registered retirement savings plans are better off using a portion of those savings in early retirement as a bridge to a higher delayed CPP benefit, rather than stretching their RRSP withdrawals over...

The pilot, implemented on July 1, 2019, provides about 500 hydro fleet employees and their dependants with online access to a doctor 24 hours a day, seven days a week, says Tanya Hickey, the organization’s senior manager of health and safety strategies. On average, the response rate to contact a physician is two minutes and consultations last around 15 minutes. Through the platform, provided by virtual health-care company Maple, employees can also receive lab requisitions, specialist referrals and medical documentation for disability management. Read: OPG wins absence management award for efforts to shift workplace culture The pilot was introduced after OPG’s eastern operations team reported its sick leave rates were higher than rates across the rest of OPG and asked about best practices for addressing the problem, says Hickey. Many of these employees had been transferred from the Lambton-Port Dover area in Ontario, and one of their major complaints was they no longer had access to family physicians. Further, these towns lack walk-in clinics, so employees were stuck in the hospital’s emergency room for six to eight hours, losing a day of work just to see a doctor. “If you don’t have a family physician, you can go to the emergency...

Goshen News (IN) May 14–Though the COVID-19 pandemic carries on, claiming thousands of lives, infecting thousands more and altering social and economic landscapes, the number of people planning ahead with health care instructions doesn’t seem to have changed. Local attorneys, whose practices include estate planning and wills, said they hadn’t really seen big increases in demand for creating advance directives for health care. They spoke anecdotally about a month into Indiana’s stay-at-home order and travel restrictions. The attorneys and doctors recommend having such documents in place, at any age, in case of a situation or emergency where a patient can’t articulate medical treatment choices for themselves. The directives can also state who a patient wants making health care decisions for them. “Usually in the medical situations, it’s important to have an advocate — somebody who’s willing to be proactive, contacting doctors and nurses and whoever they can, and to find out what the situation is and what the options are,” said attorney Loraine Troyer. “It’s like anything else, there’s just options on what to do. And that’s what a health care directive does: it appoints somebody to help choose those options.” Troyer provides wills, estate planning and bankruptcy services from...

A grey picture of the life-insurance industry is developing south of the border as some U.S. carriers start to introduce restrictions to their offerings in the face of challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Wall Street Journal, numerous Americans looking for life insurance coverage amid the outbreak are being turned away as certain insurers suspend sales of popular products, hike premiums, or scale back coverage and benefits. Numerous firms, including Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co., have temporarily stopped selling life insurance to people 70 and older with poor health. Insurance-industry leaders have cited analyses showing older people with underlying medical problems have much higher mortality rates from the novel coronavirus compared to younger ones. Citing a memo Penn Mutual issued to brokers in March, the Journal said the insurer expects “to revisit these and other changes as we gain better insight into the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.” Prudential, the largest life insurer in the U.S. by assets, has suspended sales of 30-year term-life policies, and reduced the interest it credits to certain universal life policies that combine savings and death benefits. A raft of insurers – including AIG, Nationwide Mutual Insurance, Pacific Life Insurance, and Principal Financial...

Staff | May 14, 2020 Aon has introduced an interactive online tool that forecasts the impact of the coronavirus on employee populations across Canada, aiming to help employers anticipate the effect on their benefits plan costs, absenteeism and potential requirements for shifting work operations. “COVID-19 has brought on uncertainties in many aspects of our lives and this application will help employers understand their risks,” said Greg Durant, Canadian chief actuary of health solutions at Aon, in a press release. Read: Employers taking many approaches to leave, benefits during coronavirus pandemic “Aon consultants will work with employers to build plans on how to keep employees safe while minimizing disruptions to their operations,” he added. “In these uncertain times, it is important that organizations have the most current information from which to base their decisions to safely maintain vital operations.” The tool combines employer-specific data with geographic infection rates from reputable epidemiologic models. It’s updated daily based on the spread of the virus, social distancing measures taken by local governments and the current figures of confirmed patients, hospitalizations, deaths and testing and treatment patterns. It also allows employers to estimate the impact on dental care, health care and absenteeism costs associated with the pandemic. Read: Should plan...

The Canadian Press | May 14, 2020 The federal New Democrats say all Canadians require access to two weeks of sick leave benefits as provinces start moving to reopen their economies while fighting the coronavirus and the federal government should pay for it. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Wednesday that workers without sick leave who are put back on the job during the pandemic will be left to decide between protecting others from infection and paying their bills. “We need paid sick leave, there is no question about it. It should no longer be an option.”  Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, has been reminding people almost daily to stay home when they’re sick, even with mild symptoms, or else risk further transmission of the coronavirus. Read: Employers taking many approaches to leave, benefits during coronavirus pandemic The government should be paying people to do just that, said Singh, suggesting the cost could be covered by the Canada Emergency Response Benefit or the employment insurance system. The NDP pitched the idea to the Liberals but they declined to include it in a bill presented to the House of Commons on Wednesday in the weekly opportunity to pass legislation. Singh tried to put the idea forward...

AI-powered content migration and optimization software enables the modernization of customer communications management systems Toronto, ON (May 14, 2020) – Messagepoint Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of Rationalizer, an AI-powered software solution that accelerates the migration of legacy customer communications and content to modern environments, while also enabling the optimization of that content. Since 2016, Messagepoint has offered Rationalizer as a service through its professional services team, but due to market demand, Messagepoint has evolved the solution to enable end users and other service providers to license and independently leverage the technology. Messagepoint’s new version of Rationalizer further enables automated, intelligent ingestion with support of Word and HTML documents, in addition to PDF and XML formats, and also provides enhanced AI/ML metadata tagging. Additionally, Rationalizer further streamlines the process of consolidating similar and duplicate content, enabling it to happen with a single click. The modernization of legacy content and customer communications management (CCM) systems is a key goal of many organizations that manage complex, regulated communications, such as those in the financial services, insurance and healthcare industries. To date, organizations are forced to resort to manual processes to migrate content to new, modern CCM systems. It’s not uncommon...