Lifestyle Spending Account benefit helps personalize a health and wellness journey
If you’re looking for more personalized support with your health and wellness goals, you may soon be able to choose lifestyle offerings that fit your needs — with the financial assistance to pay for them.
UnitedHealthcare’s new Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA) is a benefit designed to offer people more flexibility to choose their own health and wellness experience to help complement their employer benefits.
Employers can choose to offer the LSA benefit to their employees to help support their health and well-being. With the LSA, employees have the flexibility to use the LSA to shop for offerings they value in the UHC Store at any time during the year.
“Consumers want a more personalized health care experience with greater choice,” said Alison Kosup chief product officer for UnitedHealthcare’s commercial business. “Our sustained strategy is focused on advancing flexible innovations that balance affordability with a more empowered consumer experience.”
What is a Lifestyle Spending Account?
UnitedHealthcare’s LSA is integrated with the UHC Store, a member-exclusive digital shopping experience within the UnitedHealthcare® app and myuhc.com®.
From there, members can browse and purchase eligible offerings, often at a discount, using their LSA. With UnitedHealthcare’s LSA, there’s no waiting for a reimbursement since the transaction is handled at the point of purchase within the member’s personal UHC Store experience.
The UHC Store currently includes more than 30 different offerings from nationally recognized vendors for a variety of lifestyle, health and wellness needs, including offerings for:
- Managing stress
- Improving sleep
- Staying active and fit
- Nutrition and weight management
- Women’s health and family planning
- Mental well-being and mindfulness
The UnitedHealthcare LSA was created in response to expanding consumer expectations for health and wellness that go beyond traditional models. Today, nearly 90% of employees say their well-being is just as important as salary1 — and they expect their employer to support them.
At the same time, employers are trying to meet those expectations without dramatically increasing costs or overhauling their entire benefits structure.
More choice for employees, more flexibility for employers
One of the biggest advantages of an LSA is flexibility for both consumers and their employers.
For employees, the employer-sponsored, post-tax benefit means more freedom to decide what well-being looks like for them. Instead of being limited to a fixed set of programs, you can choose from a growing list of options that fit your lifestyle.
For employers, it can offer a simpler, more cost-efficient way to expand benefits without adding complexity or major health benefit redesigns. Rather than managing dozens of vendors or rolling out programs that only some employees use, they can fund an LSA and let individuals decide how to spend it.
People are used to personalized recommendations, easy checkouts and on-demand choices in other parts of their lives — and health and wellness should be no different.
The UnitedHealthcare LSA aims to be a meaningful step toward making healthcare work a little more like everything else in our lives: tailored, convenient and built around individual choice.
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