At 41, Bill MacLean was approaching the age at which his father had had a heart attack, and was curious about his own health. MacLean, a chartered financial analyst and investment advisor in private client services at TD Waterhouse Private Investment Advice in Halifax, decided to visit the Medcan Clinic when he was in Toronto attending national meetings in the fall of 2004

“It was a good time to check if all was in order,” he says.

This decision may have saved his life. After his assessment, he received a call saying doctors had found an enlargement in his chest X-ray. This was probably an enlarged vein, they said, but it could be something more ominous. Medcan staff asked him to have a CAT scan.

The clinic, operated by Medcan Health Management Inc., is a private facility that provides medical services above and beyond what you might get at your doctor’s office. The company charges $1,395 for its standard annual health assessment, which includes a four-hour workup that includes a chest X-ray, abdominal ultrasound, vision and hearing tests, a physical exam and nutrition and fitness counselling. Two other clinics in Canada that offer similar private services are Medisys Health Group and VIP Docs Inc. Although TD Waterhouse doesn’t pay directly for this service, MacLean was able to arrange for payment through his flexible health-care benefits plan.

For years now, large companies — including many in financial services — have been sending their top executives to such private health-care clinics. In 2006, fully 72% of CEOs and presidents and 68.5% of other senior executives were provided with annual medical exams by their company, according to a survey released in May by consulting company Mercer Inc. Only four years ago, the phenomenon was not quite so widespread. In 2002, only 42.7% of CEOs and 37.7% of other executives said their organizations provided for privately funded annual medical exams.

Now, a new trend is emerging, and the financial services industry is at the leading edge. “There is a trend of going deeper into the organization and not just offering this to the CEO,” says Mandy Moore, marketing director of the Medcan Clinic in Toronto.

One major retail bank, for instance, now has an eligibility list of 1,000; Medcan calls each of the 1,000 employees on the list to arrange appointments. As well, a few small money-management firms send their entire staff for an annual wellness check. “This is new,” Moore says. “It’s only in the past year or two that we’ve started to see more of that.”

For one advisor at a major bank-owned investment dealer — we’ll call him Brian Rodgers — this movement toward better care of employees is not happening fast enough. “We, as brokers, generate large sums of money — much more than executives or bureaucrats — and it behooves them to put $1,500 in this health plan,” he says.

Rodgers does not want his name used because he has already been “hammering” away at his manager to get this benefit, and didn’t want to be seen as even more of a squeaky wheel.

“The best producers — the top two or three levels — should be given this benefit. Fifteen hundred dollars is a drop in the bucket,” he says. “It shows me they’re concerned enough about my longevity and that they’re not going to burn me out.”

Rodgers has experienced the horror of a middle-aged colleague having a fatal heart attack at the office, and is in favour of preventive measures to guard against this kind of tragedy. Yet he worries that financial advisors won’t spend the money on health examinations unless their firms give them a push. “A lot of top brokers in Canada can afford it, but the fact of the matter is that they won’t,” he says.

Rodgers has flexible benefits, but he spends his allocation and more on his wife and children, so there are no benefits left for himself. “Right now, we have a deficit on dental and health care of several thousand dollars,” he says.

For MacLean, who is married and has two small children, the cost of his Medcan visit did not come out of his own pocket because he and his wife each had a good company health plan so they were able to co-ordinate benefits without sacrificing any services.

@page_break@Back in Halifax, he had procrastinated until March 2005, then had the recommended CAT scan done. The enlargement turned out to be a teratoma tumour the size of a fist attached to the lining of his heart. While not immediately dangerous or malignant, it had the potential to grow and/or become cancerous. In July 2005, he had successful open-heart surgery and his prognosis is excellent.

MacLean is also grateful his benefits covered the checkup. “It was cheap when you consider what might have happened down the road,” he says. “We spend thousands on our vehicles but won’t take ourselves in for a good checkup.”

Health benefits are increasingly important as a recruitment tool, human resources managers say. John Skidmore, vice president of consultant services at Winnipeg-based Investors Group Inc., oversees benefits for a network of about 3,700 IG advisors across the country. Each of them has “personal choice” benefits.

“When we bring people into the group, medical and dental benefits are important to them. In order to attract people, this is one of the base things they’re looking for,” Skidmore says.

As another layer of benefits, advisors can earn benefit credits based on the volume of business they do. “We have access to world-class specialist support to get treatment, should they need it,” he adds. “All employees pay premiums for it; it is not provided to any one group. But they tend to be higher income earners [who take advantage of that perk].”

Other companies have non-hierarchical policies. Janice Goldsborough, human resources manager at Winnipeg-based Wellington West Capital Inc., says her company is looking at the possibility of adopting flexible benefits, but in the meantime, everyone has the same medical perks: “At Wellington West, everybody gets the same benefits; from the CEO to the receptionists, it’s the same benefits package.”

That package includes life insurance, short- and long-term disability insurance, accidental death and dismemberment insurance, critical illness insurance, and dental and medical benefits, as well as an employee assistance program and an on-site fitness centre.

“A lot of investment companies have flexible benefits, so you can pick and choose according to your needs,” she says. “We’re looking at that as well. For our older advisors with families, insurance is a big component; but in the younger age bracket, it is not as big a deal.”

David Minifie, director of benefits and pensions at Toronto-based Bank of Montreal, knows Canadians value their health benefits: “Medical benefits are ranked by Canadian employees as one of, if not the most valued benefits employers provide.”

In the interests of fairness, his company treats all employees the same. “We value the health of all of our employees equally,” Minifie says, “and have not created separate classes of employees through medical coverage provisions.”

For MacLean, as the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. He believes that even if his benefits did not cover it, he and his wife would continue to have annual checkups at Medcan: “My best way to describe the decision was that it was not so much a cost decision but an investment-in-our-health decision.”

But his thinking may be unique. As Rodgers says: “We are over-stressed and never get checkups until our spouses scream at us. The system is reactive, not proactive. We’re not going to buy our own plan. We work on carrots and incentives.”

Even benefits expert Skidmore admits that while employees are comforted by superior benefits packages, they may not read the fine print: “People in general tend not to pay attention to the details until they need the benefits.” IE



An ounce of prevention



An ounce of prevention

How do private medical clinics operate in Canada, where public health care is a cherished feature of the Canada Health Act?

The answer, according to Mandy Moore, marketing director at the Medcan Clinic in Toronto, is that there are many services that the public system fails to provide.

“They are all uninsured services, none of them covered by OHIP,” she says. “It’s preventative.”

Here is a glimpse of three companies that offer private executive health programs:



> medcan clinic. The original Medcan Clinic is in Toronto, and it now has partner clinics in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa. Started about 20 years ago, the clinic now doubles in size every two years or so.

The Medcan health assessment, which costs $1,395, includes a chest X-ray, abdominal ultrasound, vision and hearing tests, a physical exam, a lung function test, nutrition counselling, an electrocardiogram, a fitness assessment, blood and urine analysis, a bone-density test, a PSA (prostate health) test for men and a Pap smear for women.

The Medcan Wellness Program, a membership that allows patients to use the Medcan Clinic as a walk-in clinic, is $895 a person annually.

The Medcan Chairman’s Plan, a

concierge service offering the highest level of care, is $4,000 a year.

> medisys health group. Medisys combines professional expertise with technological sophistication, providing comprehensive health management strategies to more than 4,000 corporate clients.

In addition to executive health, employee health management, independent medical assessments and medical imaging services, such as MRIs and CT scans, Medisys offers health-related underwriting services to insurers.

> vip docs inc. VIP Docs provides its clients with access to U.S. specialists, as well as MRI, PET, CAT and iodine scans. It has two levels of health plans designed to keep executives healthy.

The highest level of services is Executive Plus, which provides executives with a two-hour consultation with a physician who does a comprehensive and unhurried review of the patient’s overall health and well-being, paid for by the executive’s company. The cost of this health assessment is $2,500.