The Affordable Care Act: Health Insurance Marketers Get Ready

Health insurance marketers, 2012 is going to be a busy year for you. Although the Affordable Care Act won’t be enacted until 2014, everything you currently know and say about the products you provide has to change.

Here is what’s coming:

• Many smaller companies will stop providing insurance to their employees, forcing employees to find their own insurance
• This is the biggest risk and opportunity—you might lose current members during this turnover, but you will also have a shot at a much bigger pool of prospects from other payers. Likewise, those small- to medium-sized employers might only provide insurance coverage or a yearly stipend to select highly-compensated employees (a highly desirable market segment, but to be successful payers need to learn how to market to the affluent).
• Individuals will face unprecedented choice, searching state-run health care exchanges for pricing and plan information where all payers who participate are compared and competing
  • Payers will win more business and command better pricing if their brand image sets them apart from the competition
• Individuals will have a new set of expectations about health insurance that need to be met if the payer expects to keep their business
  • Health insurers need to learn what these new expectations are and watch how they change over the coming years if they expect to keep their customers satisfied.
• Health insurers even have a chance to sell higher margin insurance products such as auto, life, and pet policies.
  • But payers need to understand the likelihood of consumers buying these products from them and how they would compete against the established providers who are already accustomed to selling in a retail environment.

With all that turmoil in the marketing landscape, you need to ask yourself if your old brand image conveys what it needs to or whether you need to freshen it. And you need to understand your customers’ new expectations so you know how to satisfy them and retain them.

How do you do this? I’ll tackle that—and all of the other issues I pointed out—on this blog in the coming months (read the next post in the series). At the end, you’ll have a handy eBook containing a helpful cadre of tips and tricks, or something to take to the senior leadership as convincing fodder. Stay tuned.

If I’ve left anything off this list, or if there’s anything in particular you’re curious about regarding the Affordable Care Act and its impact on payers, let me know in the comments.