BenefitsPRO Expo Preview: Do more than just sell insurance
With emerging strategies in health care becoming more mainstream, employers are demanding more from brokers/advisors, and it’s on us to rise to those expectations.
An HR director once told me, “All brokers are the same. They all sell the same carriers and policies, so it really doesn’t matter who you choose.”
My younger self would have passionately challenged her with multiple examples of why she was wrong, but I just kept quiet, because there was an element of truth in her words. To this day, I still remember them as a reminder to do more.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched the needs of our clients evolve. With emerging strategies in health care becoming more mainstream, employers are demanding more from brokers/advisors, and it’s on us to rise to those expectations.
Be sure to check out Josh Butler’s Education session, “Do More Than Just Sell Health Insurance” at the BenefitsPRO Broker Expo on May 9 at 3:05 p.m.
Risk management is a crucial component of health care and benefits that is often overlooked by advisors. Helping organizations identify potential risks and then outlining strategies to mitigate them is rapidly becoming a requirement in broker/employer relationships. Risk management includes analyzing data on health care costs and utilization, identifying high-risk groups or sub-classes of employees, and developing targeted interventions to not only lower costs, but improve health outcomes as well.
Advisors should be using the recent passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act to access claims and utilization data. I know that brokers in many states have historically been prevented from getting this kind of information, but now the CAA prohibits gag clauses on price and quality data, and limits the types of agreements that plans and issuers can enter into with providers, TPAs and others.
Plans must now make attestations that they have not entered into agreements that prohibit plan sponsors from receiving cost and quality data. This is an opportunity to do more! But plan and utilization data is useless if you can’t use it to impact the ultimate price being paid. This is why we’ve been working to create our own health plans as a way of doing more. These custom health plans are predicated on direct-to-provider agreements we’ve negotiated on behalf of our clients. We are directly impacting the unit cost of care and reducing the actual cost to insure that care.
Risk management is about finding ways to reduce the cost of care, but also building vehicles that give plan sponsors the flexibility and freedom to pursue strategies that reduce that cost. We’re doing that through highly-customized self-funded plans administered by independent vendors who are like-minded and philosophically aligned with our mission.
As we reduce what self-funded employers pay for actual care, we pour much of that savings back into the plans we design. We’ve standardized these strategies within our plans and offer plan members valuable benefits such as $0 deductibles and $0 copays for literally thousands of medical services and generic medication.
Related: 10 sales steps to go from mediocrity to industry MVP
Other vehicles are emerging rapidly, too. We are helping even small employers discover new ways to leverage strategies like direct contracting and customized plan design. We’ve never had more opportunities to impact organizations than we have today. This is our chance to do far more than just sell insurance. I hope you’ll attend my talk at the upcoming BenefitsPRO Broker Expo in Atlanta as we explore doing more for our clients and prospects.