The Future of Insurance Sales

[Angio333]

I was wondering what you all think about this....

Do you think that today's insurance agent will be obsolete in the near future?

It seems that insurance based companies are gaining in popularity, and that we may very well have socialized healthcare (paid by us taxpayers) in the near future.

How do you think this will this affect an insurance agent's job security?

 

[CHUMPS FROM OXFORD]

Not obsolete. But far fewer of them (us). The strong will survive. The weak will die off. And the University of Cincinnati still su*ks!

I'm sorry for the last comment. I'm in a beastly mood from Saturday's thrashing.

 

[midwestbroker]

You can buy car insurance online and there are still P&C agents all over the place.

Socialized health care will never cut out the private industry. There is too much money being poured into Washington to prevent that from happening.

 

[thebeacon]

The reality is liek mentioned in the previous post "the strong will survive". I convinced that we are far far away from national healthcare. I am more concerned with large online agencies like ehealth. I was speaking with regional sales rep for Blue Shield of California and he sad that ehealth writes 80% of all the business written in the state of California. Thats is one online agency writes with one company. Thousands of brokers are fighting for 20% of the other business. Not to mention that Blue Shield, Blue Cross, HealthNet, Kaiser and competing by "giving" a lot of money to ehealth to have their plans to be featured on their website. ehealth is basicaly getting payed to make money The interesting thing is that if you ever visited ehealth you can get quotes and compare plans without even given them any info, other than age and zipcode. If you decide to submit application and give them your information you are never going to get a call from them, ever. Looking at these statistics I get impression that people avoid insurance brokers at all costs. I have no other way of explaining other than that people think if they go online they save more money rather than going through a broker. I think that more and more people are going online to shop for health and life insurance.

 

[James]

I'm not sure if I would believe the number of 80%?

 

[djs]

I was speaking with regional sales rep for Blue Shield of California and he sad that ehealth writes 80% of all the business written in the state of California. Thats is one online agency writes with one company. Thousands of brokers are fighting for 20% of the other business.

I would check these statistics. I personally doubt that 20% of health business is written online without some intervention. My guess is ehealth is writting 80% of the 20% of the pure online business in California.

I don't know this, I'm just assuming this is true. I do know that under 20% of the P&C business is written online without a person guiding them through it. Doesn't matter how much money geico and e-surance spends, they have a hard time getting people to commit with the online process. It is growing though....

Dan

 

[wilkin]

I don't think we will see single payor national healthcare anytime soon, but I do think we will see state by state mandated benefits in the very near future. These programs probably will continue to use agents in some way, but commissions will be so low most small independent agencies will not survive selling the mandated health plans alone. Insurance companies will sell the plans direct and larger health agencies will basically be call center operations because there will be no underwriting, just enrolling.

 

[midwestbroker]

That is the talk around the water cooler regarding the senior market.

Every MA carrier has online enrollment. Most of the seniors who are aging into Medicare are computer savvy. However, as long as there are multiple plans to choose from, I think that we will be just fine.

Most of the ones who do online research will call the carrier who they have decided to enroll with to send an agent out. That way they have someone there to talk to and will enroll with the agent then.

I have seen more and more of that when it comes to people aging in.

 

[thebeacon]

"djs" I know what you are saying about the online business. I will definitely double check with Blue Shield in California if ehealth is actualy writing 80% of the total business. I know when I hear something like that I ask multiple time to make sure I am getting the right info. I would not be surprised if ehealth does write 80% of all the business. Today I was looking at their 4th quarter 2006 financial report and numbers are staggering. They make way too much money for being just online insurance agency. In one quarter their net profit was over $17 million in 2006. eHealth is publicly traded so it is easy to check how much they make. I hate them

 

[Expat]

I think that E-Health writes 80% of BCBS ONLINE business. The bulk of BCBS must be written by face to face agents. How do I know this?. A few months ago BCBS website screwed up and did not save any of the Bankdraft information. I called the home office and bitched like crazy, they put me on a conference call with the Webmaster and I found that on that particular Thursday, 15 application were written on-line (Texas only) and they all had the same problem. BCBS must write more than 15 apps per day (I had written 2 of them) so I am pretty sure that the majority of their business comes from face to face.