Brokers try to pre-empt insurance exchanges
Healthcompare is one of the leaders in this move. Input your data and, after all the bells and whistles, you get a page of very high deductible plans -- $10-20,000 deductibles. In addition to the .com site, they have a .org offering the same services, but different content.
That's not health care, unless you have a heart attack or car accident. It's insurance against catastrophe, which is what insurance is supposed to be, but not what people think they're getting when they seek health insurance.
The plan under health reform is to offer an open market for serious health plans with a government-defined set of services, including wellness services, health screenings, and prevention.
Medicare offers all that, which may be why even conservatives who hate "Obamacare" want "government hands off my Medicare," not knowing it is in fact a government plan.
These are choices in the market. Coverage for your health, or catastrophic coverage. They are not the same thing.
Healthcompare is not alone in this market. There are other sites, like eHealthInsurance and HealthPlanOne, offering similar online services.
Healthcompare is a Word & Brown company, launched on March 24. If the date sounds familiar, it's the day after the President signed the health reform law.
The same firm also offers Quotit, a company that builds custom sites for agents and brokers. Among their other holdings are Choice Administrators, which it calls "the nation's only private insurance exchange," and CONEXIS, which administers COBRA plans for ex-employees who still want their former employer's insurance.
The last months have seen a drumbeat of carriers announcing they would put plans on HealthCompare. Humana, CIGNA, Blue Shield of California, and Kaiser are just some of the companies now offering policies there.
In addition to buying ads, Healthcompare has a bunch of folks who visit forums where health insurance is discussed. They also do a lot of pay per call advertising. They're on Facebook. They tweet.
One reason for the online love might be HealthCompare's program of compensating brokers for referrals. The plan was announced in an e-mail blast and drew some pushback from brokers worried about competing for individual and family plans (IFP).
The broker who spilled these beans categorized it as part of a plan to move ex-employees from COBRA plans to individual plans, hence off company books.
If that's the plan, it's working. And if that's the plan, it's not a secret either. Here's an article on Healthcompare's site touting such "high-deductible" plans, with a picture of happy young people jogging.
So we have two types of health reform, one public and one private. The public one you know about and, love it or hate it, it's the law. The other is offered by companies like HealthCompare.