Practice management

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.

Despite efforts to defund PPACA in the Republican-controlled House, and prospects of a Supreme Court test for the federal health reform law, employers are forging ahead as best they can with short-term compliance issues and long-term strategic decisions.

The economy and health reform may have prompted the youngest workers at U.S. companies to take a deeper interest in workplace benefits, according to online research conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Unum.

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.

Apple’s iPad tablets and iPhone smartphones are gaining ground against mobile devices based on Google’s Android operating system, Microsoft’s Windows mobile platforms and Symbian, used by Nokia — and the fastest adopters of iPads are financial services firms.

SourceMedia, the publisher of Employee Benefit Adviser, has acquired Insurance Broadcasting, a provider of online news and live events to employee benefits professionals.

Small company, big heart It's been a tradition at The Unity Group to give clients chocolates during the holidays. But in 2009 the Bellingham, Wash., firm made the decision to discontinue the expensive (and not exactly healthy) practice in favor of a donation to the local food bank. "With the economy down, we thought that was a great place to give back," says Kari Glennon, sales manager.

There was a time when providing good service at the local level and keeping in touch with employer groups was a marketing strategy in itself. In fact, it may even have been the only marketing strategy a benefits broker needed. But those days died with the changing economy, and the reality is that they aren't coming back.

It's now the middle of winter, and the collegiate and professional football seasons have drawn to a close. While the gridiron battlefield is now silent, another one is not - the battle of gridlock in Congress and the courts over health care reform is still going strong, and it's likely to continue for some time.

Staying in touch. It's what we do with our family and friends ... the people we care most about. So wouldn't it make sense that we also stay in touch with our clients?

In the next several columns I will be putting on my benefit sales trainer hat, with a series of columns called, "If you want to sell, do this." These will be detailed selling techniques that producers in my firm's FutureOffice Network use every day with great success.

It's now February - the perfect time to take stock of where you are and where you are going.

Looking for a way to promote his latest venture, a website where consumers can select an agent at the same time they buy their policy online, Alan Katz decided to start his own blog both as a hobby and in hopes that linking to it would increase the search engine optimization of the insurance website.

Beginning in 2014 all employers with at least 50 employees must buy comprehensive heath insurance for all full-time employees or pay a penalty of $2,000 dollars per employee.

Guardian Life will withdraw its medical insurance product line in all states, and will wind down its existing business over the next two years.

The reverberations from last year’s seismic legislative tilts will be keenly felt by insurers in the coming year. A new report by Boston-based Aite Group finds reaction to health care reform and financial services reform among five trends that will shape each sector respectively.

The value of cyberspace during open enrollment is at least on equal footing with face time, suggest two recent unpublished surveys of employees and carriers that sell voluntary benefit plans.

Life insurance and annuities made modest gains in the third quarter of 2010 — gross written premiums were up 6% over the same period in 2009 — but the industry is far from healthy, warns a report from Aite Group in Boston.

A combination of regulatory, political and economic factors are set to create an uncertain environment for U.S. health care insurers, Moody's Investors Service reports, leading to a continuation of the negative outlook for the industry.