Last week I had the great pleasure of spending time with some of the top benefits brokers in the country at Summit Business Media's very own Benefits Selling Expo in San Antonio. The highlight for me was a toss-up between the naming of Brandon Scarborough as Broker of the Year or the after party's risotto bar.
As I flew back to FreeERISA's hometown of Washington, D.C., I wondered what the health insurance world looked like in a city of 1.3 million people compared to D.C.'s 617,000.
One thing that surprised me was that the number of large health policies is actually the inverse of the populations of the two cities: 148 in San Antonio versus 286 in D.C. The median participant count is 187 in San Antonio and 139 in D.C. Simply put, D.C. has more companies that offer health insurance, but the ones that do are smaller on average.
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What's perhaps not as surprising is that, here in the harder-to-insure northern part of the country, median premiums are 44 percent higher than they are in Alamo City ($760k and $548k, respectively).
Even though the premiums are higher, as a broker you're actually going to be making more in fees and commission on each policy you sell: $21k in San Antonio as opposed to $13k in our nation's capital. Once again it's the carriers who get the bigger piece of the pie.
Maybe I should figure out the best cities for brokers (none of them) and the best cities for carriers (all of them).
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