Representatives of Canada Life appear before government committee
Representatives of Canada Life appeared by video call before the standing committee on government operations and estimates recently and apologized for providing poor service, according to the CBC.
"To those who had a poor service experience these past months: we are sorry," he said.
The committee has been reviewing Canada Life’s transition to becoming the administrator of the country's largest health-care plan after the Public Service Health Care Plan switched providers from Sun Life Financial to Canada Life Assurance Company on July 1.
The move affected over 1.7 million federal public servants, retirees and their dependants. At the same time, there were changes to which services and drugs were covered under the (PSHCP).
Re-enrolment in health-care plan
Appearing before the committee, Ryan Weiss, Canada Life's vice-president of national accounts, reported that the company had received a much greater volume of calls than expected during the transition, said the CBC.
One of the main reasons for the increased number of calls was due to the government requiring its members to re-enrol.
Representatives from Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) and Public Services and Procurement Canada also appeared before the committee. Marie-Chantal Girard, a senior assistant deputy minister at TBS, said that re-enrolment was meant to address privacy issues in transferring data from one administrator to the other.
"We had to make sure that we had a clean state and a base of information to implement the new plan," she said in the CBC article.
Weiss also said that the government did not spend much time discussing resourcing during the 18 months leading up to the switch, but Canada Life made estimates about call volume using data from the previous administrator, Sun Life.
Increased staffing at call centres
In addition to the apology, Canada Life said it has increased staffing at its call centres and claim processing centres to reduce call wait times to one to three minutes and processing wait times to just over two days.
The company expects to continue to handle calls and claims at this rate despite the continued high level of calls, he said, according to the CBC. Weiss does not expect the volume of calls to decrease to a normal level until the end of next year, given that some plan changes — including mandatory generic drug substitution — were delayed to Jan. 1.
However, the company has also facilitated a claims escalation process for plan members facing emergency health or financial hardship.
