There were some things at this year’s Benefits Selling Expo that didn’t surprise us—namely the talk of health care reform, especially as the expo was held shortly before the Supreme Court was expected to rule on the constitutionality of the PPACA. And then there were some surprises—for example, read what Howard Dean really thinks about the Obama’s reform bill. 

Still, this year’s expo—the magazine’s seventh—did what it aims to do: educate attendees and get them to think a little outside the box. During sessions on voluntary benefits and self-funding to keynotes, industry insiders talked top trends. Others focused on surviving in an industry that faces massive change and massive challenges. 

And from inspirational speaker and Benefits Selling columnist Brian Hicks to polarizing political figures, the Benefits Selling expo keynotes drew crowds and delivered on entertainment. 

Here’s a sampling of what went on. 

‘Keep the flame lit’

Brian Hicks finds his motivation in Thomas Edison.

So much so that the Benefits Selling Expo’s opening keynote speaker has trademarked “Astound yourself today”—based after an Edison quote—as his personal slogan.

And that was Hicks’ message to expo attendees Wednesday afternoon.

When brokers feel threatened by health care reform and vast regulatory changes, they can’t settle for mediocre, Hicks said. As a model, they should simply pick up their cell phones and think of Edison.

The worst thing a salesperson can do is sit around. Sales, simply put, is about people and calls.

“You can be the most educated person, but if you aren’t seeing people all the time, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes we confuse simple with easy. If we did all the things we’re capable of doing, we’d literally astound ourselves.”

“You are sitting there waiting for the phone to magically ring. But no one is calling and saying ‘we were thinking we should buy some more insurance, and thought you’d be the guy to call.’”

“But here’s the problem—what if they don’t show up?” he said. “They aren’t coming.”

Hicks said to lessen the blow of the “seismic changes” happening in the health care industry, brokers are waiting for a change—waiting for the Supreme Court, for an economic upticks, for the election in November.

But that doesn’t work—changes have to be made by you instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.

So what’s a broker to do?

Walk on water  

In a book called “If you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat”—a title he said is much better than his own book’s “The Tinderbox Tapes,” author John Ortberg talked about Peter and the other disciples. When Peter walked on water, there were 11 other guys that didn’t move, he said. And that Biblical tale applies to all of us.

“For the vast majority of us, we gotta get out of the boat,” Hicks said. “There’s a comfort zone that you’ve been in for a long time.”

Affirm the truth 

Think like Jimmy Buffet, Hicks urged. In Margaritaville, Buffet evolved from saying it was nobody’s fault to finally admitting it was his “own damn fault.” Be a Jimmy Buffet.

When Hicks said he saw “a furry pregnant woman” in the mirror recently, he could only blame himself and his love of biscuits and gravy.

“You think about how having an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he said. But when realizing that it doesn’t do anything after a day, that’s when people start realizing donuts taste better than apples. A few days doesn’t add up, but years down the road, you’ll realize you made a bad decision.

That’s the case with sales calls. Making five extra calls daily doesn’t do much, but it amounts to more than 1,200 extra calls over the year.

Preaching in the field

John Wesley became famous for preaching in fields at a time when that was considered taboo. Conventional wisdom said that if a preacher didn’t have a church, he was illegitimate. But Wesley turned out to be so good that people often hitched up the horse and buggy and traveled for days just to see him in action, Hicks said. Late in his life, a reporter asked how he managed to draw those huge crowds.

Wesley said, “God just lit me on fire and people came to watch me burn.” So Hicks asked the audience who is coming to watch you burn?

“With all the stuff going on right now, it’s easy for your flame to go out. It’s real easy to get focused on all that other stuff and not tend the flame.”

 Dean: Mandate not necessary

Governor Howard Dean told a crowd of brokers—who had slammed the former presidential candidate’s position on health care—that the individual mandate provision is “one of the very large blunders” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and predicted the Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional.

“It was never necessary in the president’s bill; they should have never put it in,” Dean told a packed room during the second day of the expo. “Both Republicans and Democrats are all essentially libertarian; we hate to be told what to do by the government.”

But he’s unsure what will happen because court lawyers made a brilliant case trying to convince the justices that without the mandate, the bill will fall apart.

Still, Dean said he expects the rest of the bill will remain intact as the court will be “very reluctant” to get rid of all of it.

Despite Dean’s history of support of universal health care, he said he wasn’t “a terribly big supporter of the president’s health reform bill. But we have what we have.”

His lack of support for the PPACA is due to a lack of cost control in the bill.

Health care in the United States has long been plagued with unsustainable costs increases.

“There is almost no successful economic incentive to drive the cost down,” Dean explained. “And it’s simple: I’m a physician, you come to me, I tell you what to buy, we send the bill to the third party and I get paid for everything I do whether it works or not. The more I do to you, whether it works or not, the more I get paid.”

The entire incentive in this system is to spend as much as you possibly can, and that’s why health care cannot continue as it is.

The solution? Pay by the patient and not by the procedure, Dean said.

“It saves us money if we invest in prevention,” said Dean, who is a former physician and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He noted Kaiser Permanente as an example of a system that does that. He also said large corporations who self-insure are also successful in that because with low turnover, they invest in their young employees health-wise because it will benefit them in the long-run.

Small and middle-sized companies don’t have those same incentives, he noted.

“Today we have an illness system—you don’t come and see [a doctor] unless you get sick. Now we’re going to have a real wellness program if we make this change,” he said.

If Obama wanted to be serious about cost control, he would have capped Medicare in the PPACA. “They didn’t have the nerve to do it because it’s political dynamite,” he said.

Some of the unintended consequences of the PPACA will be most effective, Dean said.

For one thing, “the president’s bill leaves a chance for the private sector to actually reshape health care reform.”

Dean also mentioned the controversial McKinsey report, which came out last year stating that employers would drop their coverage at record numbers due to the PPACA. Though the government had said at the time the “flawed study” was an “outlier,” Dean said employers dropping their coverage to employers “will absolutely happen.”

“By droves, small business owners will get out of the health insurance business …pay the fine…and go to the exchanges.”

And at some point, large employers will follow suit.

“[The PPACA] is going to get employers to do get out of the health insurance business, and I think that’s a good thing.”

That’s because health care inflation is disadvantaging American businesses when competing against other global businesses who don’t have that same problem, he explained.

Though it will help make an “economic impact,” he told brokers for them it will take “an enormous change.”

After admittedly “pleasantly surprising” brokers in the audience on his views on health reform—as The American Worker’s Jon Duczak said—one broker asked if his fellow Democrats would agree with him.

But Dean said that’s not likely—at least publicly. “It’s an election year, they say what they think they have to say to get elected.”

He also doesn’t expect presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to overrule the PPACA as he promised if elected because Obama will win reelection.

“The election is over,” he said. For one thing, Romney hasn’t won support of Hispanics, without which, he won’t be able to win. Dean, though, said “Romney is a good man and would have been a good president.”

During his roughly 55-minutes on stage, Dean touched on the importance of personal connections (despite the younger generation’s reliance on the Internet, “there is never a substitute for personal contact”), death panels (“The only death panel you need is the family… they make rational decisions about people they love”); and tort reform (“It’s not as big of a problem as the Republicans say it is, and not as small of a problem as the Democrats say it is. But it is a problem.”).

He also talked about the trend of consumer-driven plans and reiterated the importance of personal responsibility.

On health savings accounts, he said, “I don’t think HSAs are a bad thing but they certainly won’t get us anywhere close to solving the problem.” Though they help with “the little stuff,” they’re not helping with the major expenses or surgeries.

The most important thing Americans can do at this point is think about long-term consequences to daily decisions—from choosing what to eat to exercising.

“We have to understand we can complain about the bureaucracy of the insurance companies and the doctors and the drug companies, but essential problem in health care is us…It’s very hard to look at someone else’s expenditures when you aren’t willing to limit your own.”

Karen Hughes stumps for Romney

A s roughly the total political mirror of morning speaker Gov. Howard Dean, Karen Hughes, former G.W. Bush Administration insider and Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, told Thursday’s Benefits Selling Expo audience a thing or two about her hopes for America—and her strong faith in the political future of presumed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Hughes, who lives in nearby Austin, was also able to provide some interesting insights from her experiences inside the White House, through moments including Sept. 11 and the early days of the Iraq War. “Those were three very intense years at the State Department,” she noted

Mostly, Hughes—who now works as global vice chair of international PR company Burson-Marsteller—made it very clear that she feels that President Obama has done a major disservice to the American public, and has a good chance of being defeated this fall, as a result.

Hughes contends that Bush’s decisions to begin the TARP industry bailout program (“a very politically unpopular move, although the other option was the world’s economy going over the edge,” she said) as well as the equally unpopular notion to stage an eventually victorious surge in Iraq (“it’s a big deal to lose a war, as we found with Vietnam,” she added), both ended up being political gifts to Obama that the current administration has bashed from the beginning.

“We’re living in anxious and uncertain times, with the longest period of continued discontent that pollsters have seen since they started measuring these things,” Hughes said. “People are frustrated, angry and deeply worried. After years of being told that we could all achieve the American Dream, people my age, the baby boomers, are sincerely worried for our kids.”

Hughes says she believes that while Americans had the best of intentions in electing their first African-American president, the payoff in good will has been squandered over the last four years.

“People voted for an idea, the whole ‘yes we could’ thing, and their hopes were raised, but now they’ve been dashed. And clearly the stage is set for a major philosophical debate, between those who support a limited role for government, and those with a more paternalistic view. There’s a fundamental recognition that the path we’re on is not sustainable.

Having been through the experiences of life in the White House—frantic speechwriting efforts, a mixed bag of global responsibilities and a “dizzying blur of meetings” on complicated topics—Hughes says she sincerely believes that Romney is the right person for the job, come this fall.

“I went to the White House and discovered that life there is a series of really difficult decisions, and my role as Counselor to the President was to help him become a disciplined decision maker; you need a relentless focus on what matters. I think that Romney has great experience making executive decisions, and he really understands the impact that policies have. He’s also shown himself to be disciplined, steady and a good listener.”

Hughes added that she believes Romney’s experience specializing in “turnarounds” (such as his successful work with the once-troubled Salt Lake City Winter Olympics) and his so-far quiet commitment to faith and his family will also resonate with embattled American voters.

Hughes says that any President needs to surround himself with people who aren’t sugar-coating the truth, and thus her time with George W. Bush was particularly poignant—even if he did have a tendency to occasionally make up words as he went along.

In sharp contrast to Dean’s remarks earlier in the day (“I think we heard some wishful thinking,” she said), Hughes says she believes the reality at present is that Obama and Romney are actually in a “statistical tie” for the presidency, and that Romney’s recent experience in more than a dozen debates puts him at a great advantage when the real action begins later this year.

“If I were on the Obama team, I’d be worried. If you look at it through the ‘right track, wrong track’ measurement, just 33 percent of Americans feel that the President is on the right track, right now. I think they’ve also seen a cautionary tale in the elections that have just taken place around the world, ones that have thrown out some huge incumbent candidate.”

On the issue of health care reform, Hughes said she wasn’t able to predict the Supreme Court’s decision, though she believes either outcome will provide political leverage for the Republican camp.

“They’re going to be emboldened either way, but if the court upholds the law, I think that Republicans will be white hot,” she noted. “It all points to concerns about the declining trust in our institutions. And a lot of Americans fundamentally believe that the federal government can’t force you to buy something, especially health insurance.”

Despite the past few years of malaise and trouble, Hughes said her experiences traveling around the globe and meeting people in developing and war-torn nations only served to reinforce her faith and positivity about the American example.

“I’m still confident the country can tackle the challenges we face. And I do truly believe that public service is a noble endeavor, and that most people who get involved really do want to make a positive difference. Everywhere I went around the world, I saw Americans who were working to expand opportunities through a diplomacy of deeds.”