Can anyone tell me about Great West Group Health Coverage? I am not familiar w/them, and the HR lady recently hired at a prospect company seems to like them. Any info would be appreciated.
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Be separated.
not really a insurance co. persay rather than a co. that TPA's self insured large groups and provides company stop loss and PPO network.....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Krono
Can anyone tell me about Great West Group Health Coverage? I am not familiar w/them, and the HR lady recently hired at a prospect company seems to like them. Any info would be appreciated.
My experiences with them are quite old as I stopped selling them 15 years ago. Simple rule.. try never to sell anything you'll have to apologize for over and over... Back then their rates were cheap and their service cheaper. Spent a ton of time fixing poorly processed claims for insureds.
Maybe they are better now, I don't hear much about them up here anymore, they may have moved out of this market. They were part of the great gobbling of smaller carriers a while back. Take over lay off half the staff and expect the rest to do twice the work. From my end they just became insurance company posion. As in, do you want to work hard to get in the door and place this poor service company in there? Groups blame you for their poor performance. T
That said, maybe they're better today than they were a decade plus ago.
I worked as a Group Representative for New England Financial Employee Benefits Group for 4 years. We were a sister company to Great West and actually sold their product re-branded as New England. We even trained with GWL reps in the GWL home office.
The health plan GWL sells is a partially self funded plan, which includes an admin fee, individual stop-loss, and aggregate stop loss. The plan is designed to be presented side by side with competing fully insured plans. That is why you typically see the rates shown with the components all bundled together. For clarification, you also need to see the unbundled rates that show each piece of the plan.
Foe several years (1998-2000ish) they had major problems with their claims system. They changed software and instead of testing it in small markets they flipped the switch to go nationwide. Fried the whole system and for about a year they had to research provider contracts manually to pay claims. Bad news. But those issues apparently have been resolved.
It would take a while to walk you through the plan. I suggest getting with your GWL rep and have him walk you through the plan. Use a live proposal that you have fully insured proposals on. Make sure he tells you about the plan termination provision and the maturing factor that occurs at the first plan renewal. These are the two major "weird things" in the GWL product that can cause you great headaches. First year rates are based on immature claims (9 months of claims). When I sold the plan, I would illustrate the maturing factor and the plan termination and have the client put the illustration in their files, because for sure they would forget at first renewal.
All that said, the partial self funding concept that GWL has with their plan is great. But you have to teach it to your client and make double sure they understand it. It takes a little longer to sell. The plan is ideal for employer groups of about 75 to 200 lives. I've also had clients as small as 18-25 lives save tons of money with the plan and groups I helped sell in 1996 stayed on the books for 5+ years.
I have a couple of groups on these partially self-funded plans. When you have the right demographic (Young, healthy, mostly male, non-lawyers etc..) then there is no cheaper way to insure.
Great West Group in TX
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