Dear ECD Workers,
You or the Benefits Administratror at your local church should have received an email from our office earlier this week regarding a change in our Group Insurance Provider, effective January 1, 2021. I just wanted to follow up with you to give you a bit more background regarding this decision.
Wawanesa Insurance was our District benefits provider for many years. A couple years ago we switched to Canada Life Insurance to reduce our premiums given the heavy premium increases we were experiencing. Unfortunately, those rates have gone right back up, in large part due to a few members of our plan who have very high drug costs. Earlier this year we were approached by a broker who offered to help us with this situation to bring our costs down considerably. He was able to negotiate a discount for us that will ultimately save us collectively across all our District churches over $250,000 over the next 27 months. This is an 8% reduction from our current premiums, guaranteed for these 27 months. Additionally, at the end of the 27 months they have also guaranteed that our rates would not increase at that point by more than a maximum 15% for the 12 months after that. Given the extraordinary challenges we are all facing with budgets these days, we felt that this was an offer too good to pass up.
We recognize that this does involve a bit of extra hassle with redoing the paperwork, getting new benefit cards set up, etc… and we apologize for the inconvenience. I do hope that the overall savings to you and your fellow churches over these next 3 years will more than make up for this.
Other than the hassle and work involved with this transition, the only other slight downside to this new plan is that a drug cap of $10,000 annually will now be in place (which means that the plan will only cover the first $10,000 of medication expenses per year per member). This will affect 2 of our workers who are above this threshold, and we will do our best to see how we can help them. Most of the additional costs will be covered by the government Trillium benefit, so it will not have a major adverse effect on those who exceed this cap.
Thanks so much for your patience and cooperation throughout this season of transition. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our District team.
Serving together,
Curtis Peters
District Superintendent
