Broker blog

Can we just admit it? Healthcare and insurance are confusing! I was a broker for over three years, and I still couldn’t parse a medical bill to save my life. As an Employee Benefits Consultant, no one knows your groups better than you. But, if an advocacy program can help take some of the load off your desk by answering many of those employee questions during fourth quarter, wouldn’t that be nice for your groups' HR teams, employees AND you?

What would we do without Google? It's the world’s greatest encyclopedia. There's nothing you can’t find with a simple Google search.  

Have you heard of HonestSlogans.com? They create more, shall we say, “direct,” catchphrases for well-known companies. For instance, WebMD’s honest slogan is, “Convince yourself you have a terminal illness” – so true! For LinkedIn, they’ve come up with, “Connect with people for no good reason at all.”

A few years ago, I would’ve agreed. I’ve been a LinkedIn member since 2007 and have really only been using LinkedIn as an online resume and a place to connect with other professionals – again, for no real reason other than it might come in handy someday.

We all learned about the 3 Rs in grade school (two of which, ironically, don’t begin with the letter R). And those of us who took business classes in college learned about the 4 Ps of marketing (product, place, price, promotion). In this article, I’ll introduce a new success strategy for agents and brokers: the 5 Cs of insurance sales. 

Have you sold a telehealth case and experienced the two user extremes? These are typical responses when an employee first hears of telehealth and how it works… 

Boy, this defined contribution thing just won’t go away! Though the IRS and DOL have repeatedly told us that employers absolutely, positively cannot pay for individual health plans for their employees, some people just didn’t like that answer. A lot of people, actually – on both sides of the aisle. And they decided to do something about it.

As a benefits consultant-advisor, you’ve probably spent a lot of time over the last 5 years rethinking benefit planning and your role with customers. Today's employee benefits plan includes solutions for many issues you never had to implement a few years ago: benefits administration, HR technology, payroll systems, compliance, etc. Determining appropriate cost containment strategies has been crucial as you discuss qualified high-deductible plans, deciding to self-fund (or not), increasing out-of-pocket costs, reducing networks, changing prescription formularies, etc.

We’ve all seen huge changes in our industry. We went from indemnity plans to PPOs to managed care to ACOs. The changes keep coming and more ferociously.

As benefit consultants and teachers of the ways to save money on healthcare, we need to continue changing our spots. So far, we’ve been successful in our messaging to get clients to make choices to reduce healthcare costs. We've gotten them to stop using the emergency room and look toward the urgent care center as a less expensive alternative. Along those lines, we educated clients to use generic drugs instead of brand names.