The Healthcare Benefits Value

If you’re a news junkie like me, you will have read a lot about the benefits of healthcare coverage recently. South of the border, President Trump is in an ongoing battle with Congress over the future of Obamacare. It’s not only a fight about dollars and cents, but, more importantly, about how many Americans will be left without healthcare coverage.

This ongoing debate reminded me of the importance of our own healthcare benefits—and what happens when you lose access to them.

When I went to Edmonton in 1979 to reestablish CLAC’s presence in Alberta, members asked about access to healthcare benefits. The request baffled me somewhat, since our first collective agreements had provisions for company-supplied benefits programs for employees.

After some investigation, it soon became apparent that our members, especially those in the construction industry, often moved from one company to another. A job would finish and their employer would have no work for the foreseeable future, so they would move to another CLAC-organized employer that did have work available. Sometimes, they would stay with their employer but would be out of work for several weeks until the next job started.

In either case, these construction workers would be off the employer’s healthcare benefits plan from the day of layoff. If they moved to another employer, they would have to complete a probation period before benefits kicked in.

Although already blessed in Canada with universal healthcare, members back then—especially those with a young family—soon discovered that costs of dental care, eyeglasses, and prescription drugs could be very costly, and, in serious cases, unaffordable. It’s in this context that CLAC’s very comprehensive benefits plan for members in western Canada found its roots.

We developed a comprehensive plan that included prescription drugs, life insurance, vision care, and dental insurance, as well as short term and long term disability coverage, and sent it to various insurance companies to bid on. This was in the middle of the 1982 recession, which hit oil prices every bit as much as the one experienced in the last two years. Many workers were on layoff, and others were on work-share programs.

None of the insurance companies were willing to take on our plan. We knocked on a lot of doors trying to convince them that our small group of members would expand significantly once the recession was over. Finally, one forward-looking insurance manager for Canada Life saw potential and agreed to provide benefits based on our proposal.

We negotiated with our signatory employers to pay into a CLAC Health and Welfare Trust Fund instead of directly to the insurance company. In this way, members would have coverage no matter which contributing employer they were working for, and would have coverage while in-between jobs or on short term layoff. This meant that members no longer had their benefits terminated on the date of layoff and were covered during probation periods.

Today, the benefits plan started in the early ‘80s covers tens of thousands of CLAC members throughout western Canada. We may take our benefits for granted, but it has taken a lot of energy and effort to establish the excellent plans that CLAC currently has in both eastern and western Canada. Use them when needed and use them wisely.

In the meantime, be thankful that the debate raging south of the border has long been settled in our country.