Why Choice is Becoming the Most Valuable Benefit You Can Offer

For decades, employee benefits followed a traditional plan structure, decided by an employer, applied uniformly across a workforce. Everyone received the same paramedical caps and the same coverage regardless of whether they used it. On a recent episode of Beyond the Plan, myHSA CEO Danielle Constantine spoke with Sherri Look Yan, Chief Operating Officer at Medcan, about why that model is losing ground and what's replacing it.

How Plans Have Evolved

Traditional plans gave way to flex plans, which are now giving way to voluntary benefits and employer-sponsored options like health spending accounts. Each step hands employees more say over how their benefit dollars are used.

That arc isn't incidental to the shift toward proactive, preventative care, it's a big part of what's driving it. A plan designed around average utilization often has no coverage for someone who wants to invest in an annual health assessment, a genetics consult, or a hormone health program. A flexible dollar amount does.

What Choice Actually Buys People

The value of an HSA isn't just flexibility, it's the ability to build a healthcare experience that matches an individual's life stage and priorities. One employee might direct funds toward physiotherapy, another toward mental health counselling, another toward a comprehensive screening they've been putting off. None of those choices is more "correct" than another, they're just different people prioritizing different things.

People increasingly want control over every part of the process, not just the outcome. That's a notable shift from a benefits culture built on employers deciding what employees need on their behalf.

Why This Matters

There's a compounding effect here. When employees have the flexibility to spend on preventative care, the kind of early detection work Medcan specializes in, the

y're more likely to catch issues before they become chronic, expensive, or disruptive to their work. That has a butterfly effect on employers (lower absenteeism, better engagement) and the public healthcare system (less pressure on wait times from conditions that could have been caught earlier). Personalization isn't just about a better employee experience; it's a structural argument for why flexible benefits lead to happy employees over time. 

To hear the full conversation between Danielle Constantine and Sherri Look Yan, visit our YouTube channel, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.