Health & Dental Benefits in Kelowna, BC | Sterling Benefits

Group Health & Dental · Kelowna, BC

Health & Dental Benefits Built Around Your Team

Benefits. Handled. Extended health, dental, practitioner coverage, vision, prescription and travel coverage, disability, and EAP, whether you're a small team of 2 or a large company with locations across the region, we build a plan that truly fits your goals and needs, with the sustainability and flexibility you may not have been able to find elsewhere.

Licensed Independent Broker Rooted in the Okanagan 75+ Local Business Clients Claims Support Included

What's Covered

There Are Lots of Options to Choose From, It Depends on Your Needs

You tell us what your needs and goals are, and we'll structure your plan to fit. Not every company should have the same renewal type, and not everyone in your company has to be on the same plan design.

Plans come with pay-direct cards for prescription drugs, practitioners, and dental, plus an app for benefit tracking and manual claims submission. Let us know what you'd like your coverage to look like for you and your team, and we can set it up.

What's Included

Coverage That Covers What Actually Matters

Extended Health

The core of most plans, covering the costs provincial health care doesn't.

  • Extension to your provincial healthcare
  • Prescription drug coverage, including direct-pay cards
  • Paramedical & practitioner visits (physio, massage, chiro & more)
  • Vision care
  • Out-of-province & travel emergency coverage

Dental Care

Preventive and restorative coverage, scaled to fit your budget.

  • Basic dental (cleanings, fillings, exams, X-rays, extractions, scaling, sometimes root canals)
  • Major dental (caps, crowns, bridges, sometimes root canals)
  • Child orthodontic coverage (optional)

Flex for Your Team

Bundle several different plan designs for team members and employees to choose from in each class.

  • Multiple coverage tiers where it makes sense
  • Owner vs. employee considerations
  • Reviewed and adjusted as your team changes

Health Spending Accounts

An optional add-on, not a replacement for group coverage.

  • Flexible dollars for costs outside the plan
  • Works best when layered with a fully insured group plan
  • A tax efficient way to manage co-pays or cover beyond the limits inside group coverage

Built Around Your Team

How This Typically Works at Your Size

Group insurance works a little differently depending on how many people you're covering. Select your team size for a quick, general idea of what usually applies.

Small Teams (2–9 Employees)

  • Usually fully pooled. Your group isn't large enough to average the ups and downs of claims history, or the fluctuations of hiring and firing, on its own, and administration costs remain high even though the group is small. In a fully pooled option, costs are smoothed across hundreds or thousands of small groups by the insurer. A bad year for your team doesn't spike your renewal the way it might for an even larger, claims-rated group.
  • Mid to generous plan designs available. You're not limited to basic or anemic plan designs. You can select something that genuinely reflects your needs. Fully insured drug plans with no limits, varying options for practitioner coverage, and generous dental with child orthodontic coverage are all available.
  • Flex for your team. Even as a small company, you're not stuck choosing only one plan design for all of your staff. You can offer multiple plan design options, and your staff can select the one that fits their needs.

Growing Teams (10–24 Employees)

  • Selecting your renewal type matters. Fully pooled options with amazing customization and flexibility across multiple plan designs are available, however, you may also want to look at whether or not premium stability could be achieved on your own as well. This depends on many factors unique to your company, so an assessment is necessary.
  • Room for more flexibility. You have enough headcount to reasonably support multiple employee classes, where each class has multiple plan design options available if that fits with your goals and aligns with the needs of your employees.
  • You really have great options. Regardless of what you choose to do, you will understand the mechanism of your plan structure, and know how to navigate to achieve stability while maintaining attraction and retention.

Established Teams (25+ Employees)

  • Partially claims-rated is common after 25 employees, and ASO becomes an option after 50 employees. You take on more of the claims risk in exchange for lower administration fees and lower costs when your group's claims experience is good, often paired with stop-loss protection to cap the downside.
  • Blending renewal types can make sense. Rather than one funding method for everything, different coverage categories are sometimes structured differently within the same plan.
  • Rate guarantees start to matter more here. Although you may have a sophisticated plan design with multiple structures and classes, your size starts to warrant longer rate guarantees. In some cases we can provide up to a 6-year guarantee, and manage disability administration as well.

This is general guidance, not a quote. Every group is underwritten individually. Want to know exactly where your plan stands? Compare your current plan →

Not Sure How Your Plan Stacks Up?

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Your current benefits booklet, latest premium statement, or a recent renewal letter.

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A straightforward, no-obligation report showing where your plan stands and see if there are better options available.

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What Clients Say

Real Businesses, Real Coverage

★★★★★ 5.0 out of 5 · 17 Google reviews

“Ralph was incredibly patient with me. He walked me through customized options where our staff can fully utilize their benefits without breaking the bank for us as the employer, so nobody needs to overpay for things that don’t get used.”

Louisa Li

“Ralph manages all our company benefits, hands down the best customer service in the industry. He takes the time to ask questions to thoroughly understand what’s needed even if I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at or why.”

Coral Rosario

“Ralph’s customer service is outstanding, he goes above and beyond to ensure clients receive the best health and dental benefits packages tailored to their needs… He’s able to customize amazing packages for people who are self-employed and for small to medium size businesses.”

Carmen Facciotti

Common Questions

Health & Dental FAQ

What's typically included in a group health and dental plan?+

A typical plan includes extended health (prescription drugs, paramedical/practitioner visits, vision, travel coverage) and dental care (basic and major dental, often child orthodontics), with plan design and coverage levels built around your team rather than a fixed template.

I already have an HSA, why would I need group benefits too?+

HSAs are great when your health costs stay predictable, but they aren't built for the unpredictable. Cancer drugs can run around $6,500 a month, epilepsy medication near $5,000 a month, and some biologic drugs cost hundreds of thousands per injection. A group plan with fully insured drug coverage means that risk sits with the insurer, not with you. An HSA works best as an add-on to a group plan, not a replacement for one.

Does the right plan structure change based on how many employees I have?+

Often, yes. Smaller groups are typically fully pooled, which smooths out a bad claims year across many small groups. As a group grows, options like flex-rated or claims-rated funding, and eventually ASO, can become realistic, sometimes blended together within the same plan. Every group is underwritten individually, so this is general guidance, not a quote. See the team-size breakdown above for more.

How do I know if my current plan is a good deal?+

The honest answer is we won't know for certain until we look at what you have. Send over your current benefits booklet, latest premium statement, and renewal letter for a free, no-obligation comparison. We'll give you a clear, straightforward picture of where your plan stands.

Will adding a group dental plan affect employees currently using the Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP)?+

It can, and it's worth explaining to your team before you roll out new coverage. CDCP eligibility is based on access to dental coverage, not whether someone actually enrolls or uses it, so once your group plan gives an employee (and their covered dependents) access to dental coverage, they generally become ineligible for CDCP, even if they choose not to sign up for your plan. That's not a downside of adding coverage, just something your team should hear from you first rather than discover on their own.

How is a group dental plan different from the Canadian Dental Care Plan (CDCP)?+

CDCP is a federal safety net for Canadians who don't have access to private dental coverage and fall under an income threshold (currently under $90,000 in adjusted family net income, with the portion you pay increasing in tiers as income rises). It exists to fill a gap, not to compete with employer benefits. A group plan typically differs in a few practical ways: there's no income test, coverage isn't limited to a set list of preauthorized procedures, employees generally aren't waiting on a government eligibility review before treatment, and your team can see any dentist rather than being limited to CDCP-participating providers.

Ready When You Are

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Also thinking about life, disability, or critical illness coverage for your team? See how that coverage works →