Dennis Serre
Great benefits help attract and keep quality employees. Still, like many insurance plans, the costs have steadily increased year after year. It’s a big impact to your corporate bottom line. How do you control costs while delivering the quality and range of benefits that employees want?
Consider this:
Group benefits, Private Health Services Plans (PHSPs) — It seems options are popping up everywhere, on TV and online. At first, even I found it difficult to know what route to take. I could never find the perfect plan to answer all my needs, that is, until I created my own PHSP.
Back in 2000, I was faced with yet another significant increase on my own group benefit premiums. Year after year, costs increased – and at much faster rate than my actual claim usage.
Soon I realized that a PHSP was a better route. It allowed me to control the dollars spent by paying a small percentage only for actual approved claims made. In contrast, group benefits require payment of set premiums regardless of whether a benefit is used.
What’s more, unlike group benefits, the PHSP wasn’t restrictive in the types of medical and dental expenses that were eligible. As long as my expenses qualified under the Income Tax Act, they were eligible under the PHSP. With group benefits, certain categories qualified and others did not.
After setting up a PHSP through various existing providers, it became clear — service was not their priority. Sometimes my claims took weeks to process for reimbursement.
Fast forward through two years of frustration, we finally decided to launch our own PHSP program with an online system that would ease the pain of submitting claims.
For over ten years, Serre Financial has provided top quality PHSP service with promptness and efficiency. Our online system is now a benchmark in the industry for client service and usability. There are even options for customization. Serving many thousands of active clients and claims, we have recently further updated our online system to provide even more efficiency and ease of use. These benefits help both plan administrators and employees.
With significant increases in our claim volume and new plan setups, we’ve also made it easier to give feedback on our site. That’s because, unlike any other PHSP provider, we remain committed to delivering the continuous improvement and service excellence that we couldn’t find elsewhere.