As provider networks continue to shrink and more non-network facilities like free-standing emergency rooms pop up, it’s crucial that brokers explain the importance of staying in network to their clients.
Most agents who sell group health coverage, and some that sell individual as well, create a spreadsheet in order to present the plans in an “apples to apples” format so their clients can quickly narrow down their options. While the spreadsheet can be a useful tool when comparing dissimilar plans by helping the client focus on the most important benefits, one big disadvantage of a quote spreadsheet is that it minimizes the characteristics of a health plan that differentiate it from the other options.
Do you know what your close ratio is? What percentage of your prospects actually turn into clients? If you don’t know, it might be a good idea to start keeping track of this information. It will help you determine what sales techniques work and help identify areas of improvement.
Unless you’ve been in the business long enough to be grandfathered, you’re probably required by your home state to complete a couple dozen continuing education hours each license renewal period.
For those who qualify, short-term health plans can be a great alternative to ACA compliant individual plans, especially now that the individual mandate penalty has been reduced to zero. True, short-term plans do not cover preventive care or pre-existing conditions, and they are not guarantee issue like individual plans are, but they do offer much lower monthly premiums than individual plans.
Let’s be honest—most preventive care visits don’t really prevent illnesses. When we go to the doctor to get poked and prodded during our annual physical, most of the tests are intended to determine if we already have or are susceptible to something that, without treatment, could become more serious.
In a recent AHCP blog post, we explained that a hospital price transparency law that went into effect January 1 of this year really does very little to help consumers better understand the cost of medical care. Instead, it simply requires hospitals to post their chargemaster data in a machine-readable format on its website. We finished the post by saying that “only time will tell how impactful this particular rule will be, but the movement towards transparency is a step in the right direction.”
If you think back to the days when you were studying for your insurance license, you may remember learning a couple terms that are related but have different meanings. In this post, we’ll discuss Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard and explain why both of these terms are relevant in today’s health insurance environment.
As we enter the second quarter, this is officially the slow time of the year. The phone has stopped ringing off the wall, and you’ve settled back into your normal insurance routine. So we have a question:
A recent article from Health Leaders Media summarizes the results of a global study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Here are a few of the findings:
