By Bill Rusteberg
Working Americans have long been dependent on benefit decisions made by someone else. That will change and it won’t be long before it does.
GROUPTHINK IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK
Groupthink turns otherwise independent-minded people into herd animals believing group sponsored benefit plans are better than plans available outside the workplace. That belief will change because it’s no longer true.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) challenges groupthink by requiring outside workplace individual health plans to cover the same essential benefits employer sponsored health plans are mandated to cover. No longer can it be said with certainty that one-size-fits-all group plans are better than multiple-choice individual plans.
Groupthink believes group health plans have a better cost basis than outside policies due to greater purchasing power through economies of scale and spread of risk. Groupthink believers fail to understand that outside individual health insurance policies have far great economies of scale. By way of example the Texas individual health insurance market risk pool consists of over 4,000,0000 Texans making it the largest risk pool in the state.
THE OLD VS THE NEW
Door Number 1 provides choices; Door Number 2 doesn’t.
People with brains inherently like choices and most will choose outside policies through Door Number 1. People gifted with no choices will have no choice other than to pick groupthink’s Door Number 2.
No longer will employee-paid health care benefits funded by way of reduced wages be cloaked as employer paid. Instead, American workers will receive the full pay they didn’t know they’ve always had but heretofore never received. Tax favored salary reduction refunds will empower plan members to purchase outside policies of their choosing through Door Number 1 made possible with money formerly taken from them by their employer in a long-standing nefarious scheme to pay for “free” company health insurance that wasn’t.
INSURANCE BROKERS & CONSULTANTS
Insurance brokers and consultants will be replaced by AI characters like George. Legacy brokers and consultants will become less relevant as time goes by. They will become extinct in less than a generation as these grey-haired dinosaurs die off, not to be replaced by a younger generation that knows better.
VOLUNTARY BENEFITS
Voluntary benefits through online benefit aggregators will replace brokerage driven schemes owned and controlled by independent brokerages posing as administrators. Open market benefit offerings will be aggregated onto AI driven Drudge-like platforms for easy access 24/7/365. Employers will no longer be in the payroll deduction benefits business, and neither will their former bread line brokers.
THE TRUTH
In time these predictions will be commonly understood and proven true because they are and have been. We are seeing market demand moving in that direction faster than a speeding bullet with the rising popularity of ICHRA and AI driven online benefit offerings. Forerunners are particular to the world of property & casualty personal lines insurance.
These interesting times bring new opportunities for those with the vision to see what others don’t and the courage to act without fear or regret. The future will not be legacy broker driven. It will be legacy broken.
