All this time I have spent worrying about health care reform and it is finally occurring to me what really might be happening.
I'm not sure that we need to fear reform so much as we do a health care exchange. This is just code for a govt quoting engine - like the software already available from several companies.
Basically, the govt intends to setup "exchanges" that allow consumers to compare plans from the traditional carriers as well as a govt plan. Compare, contrast, call the carrier, call the govt employee, and finally enroll in a plan. What's missing? You guessed it, us!
Individual and family health insurance agents just might go the way of the dinosaur. We will be replaced by an exchange. The insurers won't care. If they replace us, then they can reduce costs and compete with the govt plans.
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A.M. Hyers
Hyers and Associates, Inc.
Well in Oct. both the house and the senate are suppose to have proposals ready for true review. So I guess we will have to wait until then to see if we are still in the game.
Gents, the handwriting is on the wall. Our industry is under attack from all sides - MA plans, indexed annuity accounts, health care reform with insurance exchanges.
Call me chicken little if you like, but it's time to start to worry about some of this and push back a little. Or if you guys want to find new work - I'll be happy to help out your clients...
Gents, the handwriting is on the wall. Our industry is under attack from all sides - MA plans, indexed annuity accounts, health care reform with insurance exchanges.
If you are 100% convinced, you owe it to yourself and your family to find another way to make a living. I for one have no idea what will happen, but will keep writing business while devloping another honey hole as I go.
the handwriting's been on the wall since the early 90's yet here we are
Pre-dates that.
Medicare (circa 1965) was supposed to be the death knell for health insurance carriers. First they would not have any reason to write biz on those over age 65, then the govt would take over all of it.
OK, I'll do that. I was hoping to get some conversation going about health exchanges and what they really mean. The only way insurance companies could compete with the govt is to cut out some overhead - likely us.
The health exchange, if it comes about, allows individuals to literally "shop the country" for the best rate in much the same way you shop for a computer or internet date. Sounds great to the idiots who are proposing it and those who support it, but it won't work.
Been tried before in the small group market and failed miserably.
Been tried before in the MEWA market and failed miserably.
The so-called "public plan option" is more political BS. Obamaman says he wants to give us a choice of a taxpayer supported public plan like govt workers have. Something that will compete with the private market to keep insurers honest.
The outline of the public plan is actually more like Medicare/Medicaid in the way it will operate and the way it is funded. Of course M/M have the lowest reimbursement to docs and hospitals as it is so both groups try and limit their exposure to M/M patients to less than 20%.
Docs have more control over that than hospitals and anyone who has turned 65 is aware of the difficulty in finding someone to treat you once you go on Medicare. I have clients who had their kids on SCHIP (Peachcare in Georgia) and had trouble finding pediatricians who would treat their children. I also have some dentists that refuse to treat anyone with M/M/S.
How much easier will it be for providers and those covered under this public plan to find providers?
You can worry about what if or you can deal with what is. I usually don't get involved in these any more but I had some time to kill.
What a lot of people in our industry don't understand that Marco touch on is reimbursement rates/ network discounts.
As Marco stated any gov. health plan is going to reimburse the doctors at the lowest possible rate for services. So you will literally have doctor that will only treat Gov. plan people on Tuesdays.
What I am telling my SCHIP clients that they really need to form a strong relationship with the kids doctors before going on SCHIP. This way they are not treated as a number but as a patient.
None of the politicians have giving any information on how these health exchanges are going to be set up. What I heard 3 weeks ago is now totally different from what B.O. is saying.
Even if they come out with Gov. health plan its the so called 45 million people uninsured that will qualify for it.
So I think we will still be in the picture. I do think we could end up making 15%-20% less.
I think individual health insurance agents are in a significant amount of trouble under a health insurance exchange scenario.
It's certainly a fair point to question whether health reform will actually pass this year, but if it does, a health insurance exchange will almost certainly be a part of it. Imagine for a second that health reform does actually happen...
What are the main functions of a broker in selling an individual policy? In the most simplistic sense, 1.) Laying out the appropriate plans for the customer 2.) Explaining to the customer the advantages and disadvantages of each policy, and why one is better for them than the other.
This seems like an issue, given what the exchange will do. It will lay out all of the plan options available to people in a given geography. As importantly, those plan options will almost certainly be standardized, so each of the premium quotes provided by plans will be comparable. In essence, the exchange will duplicate most of the functions that an agent provides in the sales process.
That's not to say that individual brokers will go away. Some people will still want some assistance in selecting a policy. But agents are not going to get paid anywhere near what they make today with an exchange. With such a focus on cost, it is hard to see how an expense that adds 10-20% to the cost of an individual premium is sustainable. Particularly considering how much broker commissions have grown on an absolute dollar basis over the last 5-10 years because of the big increase in premium rates.
Take Massachusetts as an example. My understanding is that individual health agents in MA now receive a commission of $10 per subscriber per month because of the exchange that was implemented a few years ago. And that's not $10 per member per month, that's $10 per subscriber, so whether it's an individual or a family, the commission is still the same. Over a two-year period, that works out to something like a 60-80% reduction in commission rates relative to what agents receive today.
Well, something is coming - what it will look like or to speculate on it...we might as well start a thread on alien life.
The war is all but over, the economy is what it is and the main focus is health care reform. For some reason everyone seems to assume negative implications for health agents however it's possible that even with reform we'll be just fine.
Well, something is coming - what it will look like or to speculate on it...we might as well start a thread on alien life.
The war is all but over, the economy is what it is and the main focus is health care reform. For some reason everyone seems to assume negative implications for health agents however it's possible that even with reform we'll be just fine.
In my latest aetna meeting last Friday they stated that GI is a definite but will not be implemented until 2013.
There's more to it than that - you can't have GI without a mandate and I don't think we'll see a mandate. GI without a mandate pools the sick and collapses on itself.
Health Exchanges
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