The insurance industry's trade body wants Canadians to stop thinking of workplace benefits as perks - and start seeing them as healthcare
The Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association (CLHIA) is betting that the country's healthcare debate is stuck in the wrong frame.
Its new multi-year awareness campaign, driven primarily through social media, aims to close what CEO and president Stephen Frank calls a fundamental gap in how Canadians understand the workplace benefits coverage they receive.
Employees face workplace benefits disconnect
"What we're finding when we poll Canadians is that the vast majority of them – 80 per cent plus - highly value their benefits. But they understand them as benefits, and they don't make the connection to them being part of the healthcare system," he said.
The scale of the disconnect, Frank argues, is what makes it consequential. Roughly 27 million Canadians access some form of workplace benefits and each may use their coverage 10 or 20 times a year, from dental visits, physiotherapy sessions, prescription fills.
Taken individually, those look like perks but when taken together, they represent hundreds of millions of healthcare encounters annually and account for roughly a third of total health spending in Canada, according to Frank.
Yet the campaign carries an admission baked into its premise: the insurance industry has, until now, failed to make this case. Frank acknowledged that definitive data linking workplace benefits to reduced strain on the public system does not exist in Canada but also emphasized how “the system needs to be reformed,” he said.
“We know it can do better. We're only going to get there if we're having better collaborative discussions across government, within the industry. Everybody's just got to come together on a different basis," Frank said.
A social media-first campaign
As to whether a campaign can produce the systemic shift CLHIA envisions, Frank explained the campaign is primarily social media-driven, built around a series of short videos and digital ads, with some traditional media placements supplementing the effort.
While CLHIA plans to monitor the campaign's performance and adjust its content based on what resonates, the core metric is whether Canadians begin to shift from viewing their coverage as a valued workplace benefit to recognizing it as part of the healthcare system.
Moreover, Frank acknowledged that the campaign does not address some of the harder questions facing the industry, including the roughly 30 per cent of Canadians without workplace coverage and the inefficiencies that exist within the current system.
While he emphasized those issues matter and that insurers have the data, technology, and innovation capabilities to contribute meaningfully to solving them, CLHIA sees the awareness effort as a necessary first step.
Frank noted the organization's position is that it can’t jump straight to policy discussions without first establishing a shared understanding of the role private coverage plays in Canadian healthcare.
Campaign can lead to meaningful benefits outcomes
While the campaign is not directly aimed at plan sponsors, Frank said the hope is that the campaign reinforces the value of their investment in benefits as something that extends beyond compensation, playing a rehabilitative and preventative role in keeping employees healthy and at work.
“If we can make them highly value it as part of an even bigger story around healthcare reform, which people care deeply about and Canadians are increasingly aware is not working as well as it needs to, I think that also solidifies the value that an employer gets from providing those benefits,” said Frank.
“Then, if we can, in a perfect world, get to solving some of the inefficiencies in the system and start understanding better where the value is and how we're keeping people healthy and what costs we're avoiding and can start to collaborate on those, that of course feeds back into an employer's decision on what to invest. But we don't have those discussions at that level in Canada. We need to start having them,” he added.
Success for campaign means government involvement
CLHIA will measure the campaign's success on two fronts. In the near term, the organization will track whether its polling shows a shift in how Canadians understand the connection between their workplace benefits and the broader healthcare system.
Over the medium term, the goal is to open a different kind of dialogue with government - one built on collaboration rather than opposition.
According to Frank, the campaign has no firm end date and is designed to run over multiple years, with CLHIA tracking progress through ongoing polling. When survey results show a measurable shift in how Canadians understand the role of workplace benefits within the broader healthcare system, the organization will know the message is landing and will build from there, he said.
"The only way we're going to be able to provide healthcare to the baby boomers as they retire, and we're going to be able to do it affordably, is through the use of technology, through use of innovation, through the partnership with the public and private sector," he said.
While he acknowledged that shifting the thinking of 40 million people takes patience, he believes the timing is right. Particularly as the traditional framing of private and public healthcare as separate domains is something CLHIA wants to move past in favour of a more collaborative posture focused on what the two sectors can accomplish together.
“There’s an understanding in Canada that we need to do better. Governments have a certain role to play and we've got a role to play but bringing us together could really provide some material benefits for Canadians,” he said. “There's an openness to that now that probably didn't exist maybe 5 or 10 years ago. We think there's a moment here where there's an opportunity to start having better discussions.”
