Advisor strategies

Our industry is in a state of massive flux. With regulatory and economic challenges constantly bearing down, agency leaders and advisers are anxiously searching for solutions to current problems as well as those that are swiftly approaching.

One year into the brave new world of health care reform, there’s good news and there’s bad news, says industry insider Eric Johnson.

A National Association of Insurance Commissioners task force is seeking comments from brokers, agents and advisers on the impact of PPACA’s medical loss ratio rules. The comments will be the basis of a meeting of the task force scheduled for later this month.

Employers struggling to stay afloat in the flood of guidance on implementing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will find themselves looking both forward and backward this year. Their challenge: to gauge how the PPACA rules issued so far are affecting their plans while at the same time anticipating the changes that lie ahead in 2012, 2014, and even 2018.

Several members of Congress from both political parties expressed support last week for the role of the agent and broker post-health care reform. The legislators addressed a crowd of more than 700 at the National Association of Health Underwriters’ annual Capitol Conference in Washington, D.C. — including calls for the medical loss ratio provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to be altered.

State health insurance exchanges mandated in the health care reform law — assuming they survive court challenges to the law — are getting federal funds to launch but must be self-sustaining afterward.

Without a doubt, many of us working deep in the weeds of our organization's health plans are wary of the ever-mounting regulations surrounding health care reform. Recently, I attended a presentation that included a flowchart of implementation dates that looked sort of like a MapQuest depiction of lower Manhattan.

As predicted by producer organizations, the interim final rule on medical loss ratios issued Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services left agents and brokers on the administrative side of MLR calculations.

Sam Fleet, president of AmWINS Group Benefits, sees many opportunities to make up for the loss of commission revenue due to health care reform.

So, I promised that we’d get back to analyzing health care reform, and I am a woman of my word. We’re going to do things a little different today, though, and make today’s post a listen instead of a read.

Forgive me, pros. I’m a little bleary-eyed today, since I stayed up until after midnight to get the official vote tally (219-210, by the way) and real-time analysis of Sunday’s House vote on health care reform.