Medibank said the corporate pricing plans are confidential. But health insurance would cost a regular customer in their 30s or 40s living in NSW or Victoria and earning $100,000 a year, anywhere from $2,161 a year for basic hospital insurance to $4,389 a year for comprehensive Hospital and extra insurance.

attract talent

Medibank’s recent additions include mining company IGO, which joined last fiscal year to offer all full-time and part-time employees fully subsidized access to Medibank’s Corporate Gold Health Cover.

IGO pays the bonuses and employees can register for the benefit on their first day of employment. Six out of ten employees have registered so far. Meanwhile, employees on temporary contracts longer than 12 months can apply for up to $5,000 per year to cover the cost of their medical insurance under a separate reimbursement plan.

“The pandemic has fundamentally transformed the labor market, and employers must now look at different ways to provide meaning and purpose to employees in order to attract and retain talent,” said Sam Retallack, IGO’s chief people officer.

“At IGO, this was in the form of new types of vacations, well-being initiatives, job sharing, workplace flexibility, or learning and development opportunities.”

Additional perks

Jane Lowney, director of recruitment agency Robert Walters Brisbane, said non-financial employee benefits have become more important against a backdrop of rising living costs and severe labor shortages.

“Amid the rising cost of living and underlying inflationary pressures, the number of Australian companies offering the benefit is growing rapidly, as are the sectors making it available,” Ms Lowney said.

she said The Australian Financial Report it was also a “useful tool in administration [internal] pay par and still attract the best employees”.

“It acts alongside sign-up bonuses and additional vacations as benefits that don’t inflate salary levels and stir up resentment,” she said.

Other perks on the table include flexible working hours, childcare allowances, mortgage contributions, extra vacation time and more opportunities to learn new skills, Ms Lowney said.

The provision of subsidized health insurance is consistent with employers’ renewed focus on supporting a healthy work-life balance “after the change and uncertainty of the pandemic,” said Andrew Brushfield, director of staffing agency Robert Half.

Mr Brushfield said employers would invest in the company’s wellness initiatives and “offer additional perks such as mental health support, gym memberships and financial advice”.

Many also emphasized “career development opportunities by offering mentoring programs, external training and international assignments”.

Earlier this year, service company PwC asked 1,800 Australian workers what they valued most about their employer.

Salary and other financial benefits topped the list, followed by health and well-being measures second and work culture third.

Some organizations view risk management simply as slowing down and planning before proceeding, while others make it an important organizational building block.

According to one expert on the subject, risk management in the cannabis industry is still new and underdeveloped.

And the industry’s next steps must be to recognize the value of better and more sophisticated risk management in order to grow.

For our latest podcast, we spoke to Rocco Petrelli, Chair of the National Cannabis Risk Management Association. The NCRMA offers education and insurance to its members.

Takeaways from this conversation follow.

Petrelli, who helped found NCRMA when the industry was in its infancy, said the group’s members have grown in size and complexity.

“We still have a fairly broad cross-section of vertical members,” he said. “And according to their ownership structure, we have some of the MSOs that have joined and are actively participating. Others have joined and are not actively participating.

He said the core membership is still made up of mid-market companies, primarily independently owned companies, which are “more in a survival mode in the current state of the cannabis market.”

Petrelli gave an overview of the state of risk management in cannabis on the podcast, speaking about the need for more sophistication in industry practices and more clarity about which practices to follow.

Since his organization focuses on education, he naturally believes that better education is the best way to improve these practices.

“We continue to offer the curriculum through the NCRMA Academy, which now has seven different curriculums and over 45 separate courses that address different risk areas,” he said. “We continue to expand this offering based on what we learn from our members and based on what we learn from the risk assessments we conduct in the industry.”

The top emerging risks in the cannabis industry, according to the organization’s findings, include talent optimization, product liability due to contamination, and cannabis health and safety.

The latter is important from two perspectives, Petrelli said.

“Taking care not only of situations that cause injuries, but also things on the ergonomic side like repetitive movements,” he said. “We did a lot of work with biomechanics and bioanalytics to identify the effects of repetitive movements, such as trimming and pruning.”

Finally, he was asked if the general state of risk management in the cannabis industry was advanced enough to be on par with, for example, the automotive industry from which Petrelli came.

“Still light years away,” he replied.

“One thing cannabis needs right now, and that’s profitability,” he said. “And profitability isn’t based on the revenue line. The profitability results from the cost line and the costs from risk management. Not only the practices that risk management teaches you, but it also installs a culture and a level of discipline and a level of accountability in a company that improves that company so that you have more successful companies that then create a successful market. And then when you have a successful market with the best-in-class companies, some of those companies become market leaders and raise the bar for everyone else.”

Related:

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Cannabis Risk Management

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Dave Lusk, who lives on San Carlos Island sandwiched between Fort Myers and devastated Fort Myers Beach, Fla., shared the story of how his daughter and her family decided to weather Hurricane Ian in their three-story home the tiny island.

When the Gulf of Mexico invaded the first floor last Wednesday, the family moved to the second floor. When the water rushed in there, they climbed to the third floor.

“She said she thought she was going to die,” Lusk said.

Within an hour, her neighbor’s house was ripped from its foundation and crashed into hers, Lusk said. Neighbors climbed through a window to Lusk’s daughter’s house.

Luckily for Lusk’s daughter, she had flood insurance for her stately home. But thousands of others in Southwest Florida — where the worst damage was caused by flooding and storm surges exceeding 12 feet in some areas — didn’t.

The question now is whether the fury of Hurricane Ian will finally prompt more homeowners in vulnerable coastal areas to take out flood insurance.

“We expect this to be a wake-up call for Florida residents,” said Trevor Burgess, CEO of Neptune Flood Insurance, an excess insurance company that has 130,000 flood policies statewide and about 30,000 in Florida.

For example, after Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston, Texas area in 2017, demand for flood insurance increased in that area, Burgess said.

As the hurricane made its way toward Florida’s west coast early last week, Neptune saw a four-fold increase in requests for listings from coastal landowners. However, due to the firm’s 10-day wait, which Burgess says is faster than NFIP’s 30-day wait, none of them could be tied before the storm hit. Neptune policies provide coverage in excess of the $250,000 cap offered by the National Flood Insurance Program – up to $4 million. The average premium is about $1,000 a year, Burgess said.

Only about 15% of Florida homes have flood insurance, a number that has declined slightly in recent years, he noted. Milliman, the national actuarial firm, said that in Florida counties that have evacuation orders for Ian, about 18.5% of homes are insured under the National Flood Insurance Program, according to the New York Times.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that flooding, not wind damage, will drive losses in Florida,” wrote former Florida Deputy Insurance Commissioner Lisa Miller late last week.

The hurricane hit parts of Florida with a double whammy. After winds of 150 miles per hour battered the southwest coast on Wednesday, 14 inches of rain was dumped in the central part of the state and areas around Orlando were flooded. All the water then flowed southwest, breaching levees and flooding properties in Northport, north of Fort Myers. The muddy water messed up traffic for hours from Tampa to Naples.

According to news reports, Ian killed 70 people in Florida and at least seven others in the Carolinas as it moved north. Early estimates of insured property losses continue to rise and totaled $40 billion through Sunday, the service Fitch Ratings said. Karen Clark & ​​Co estimated the losses in the USA and the Caribbean at almost 63 billion dollars.

Michael McNitt, president of Cabrillo Coastal Insurance Co., which insures property across Florida, said Saturday the airline expects many claims but said it’s too early to know the extent of the losses. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation had not released Ian’s catastrophe loss data as of late Sunday.

Several insurance agents in the Fort Myers area suffered losses on their personal property and offices, said Kyle Ulrich, president of the Florida Association of Insurance Agents. A number of agents could not be located by Insurance Journal reporters who were in the Fort Myers area Friday and Saturday.

Widespread power and cellphone outages in the area meant insurance agencies remained closed on Friday and Saturday. Unable to reach their agents, some homeowners drove to the agency’s offices but left in frustration. Others complained to local radio stations that they could not reach their agents, perhaps unaware that the agents themselves had suffered harm.

North of Ground Zero, homeowners and agents breathed a sigh of relief as the storm, originally aimed at the densely populated Tampa area, turned east.

“We dodged a bullet,” said Austin Boyd, who along with his father, Senator Jim Boyd, runs the Boyd Insurance Agency in Bradenton on the southern edge of Tampa Bay.

Boyd said the agency has written about 100 policies in the Fort Myers area and he expects numerous claims. In Bradenton, policyholders had reported fallen trees, collapsed fences and swimming pool cages torn apart.

However, water damage remains the top concern for insurers in Lee and other Southwest Florida counties. And with rising sea levels, a projected increase in hurricanes and heavier rainfall patterns in parts of the country, studies show more real estate agents and homeowners will experience flooding in the coming years.

“Everyone needs flood insurance,” said Neptune’s Burgess. “The highest point in Florida is only 400 feet above sea level.”

He said many homeowners mistakenly believe their homeowners’ insurance policies cover flood damage. Others don’t think they’re in danger because “FEMA’s flood maps are wrong,” Burgess said.

Federal Emergency Management Agency maps have historically shown “X-Zones,” which FEMA considers only moderately flood prone. Burgess argued that property owners often think their locations don’t need insurance.

“About 20% of our claims are in X-Zones,” he said.

Risk Rating 2.0, FEMA’s new system for rating flood-prone areas, was developed to provide more accurate and equitable flood insurance rates. Since the system went into effect a year ago, NFIP premiums have fallen for some but risen for thousands, prompting some owners to avoid flood insurance, Burgess said.

Top photo: A boat that appeared to be transporting a destroyed building on the hard-hit island of San Carlos off Fort Myers Beach (Insurance Journal photo).

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Florida high tide storm