Private Health Insurance Exchanges
BY QuoteJuice / Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
Back in 2008 Lt. Governor Casey Cagle tried to a law to create the Georgia Health Marketplace – a RomneyCare-style exchange program. It failed, but at that time I realized that private health insurance exchanges had a place here in Georgia.
I started a new company, QuoteJuice, Inc., and began building insurance exchange software from the ground up. It took a year or so to have a working product – QuoteJuice.com, but I must say we are successful and making money.
Today I was pleased to see this article by Sarah Kliff from Politico on the growth of private health insurance exchanges. She writes:
It’s a model that the private exchange officials hope will gain traction as employers look for ways to cut their costs without dropping health coverage completely.
“Employers want to offer benefits and care about attracting talent,” says Abir Sen, CEO of Bloom Health, the technology company that will run the new health exchanges. “But they’re increasingly wondering how they came to be in the business of health care. Bloom, at the highest level, is a way for an employer to responsibly limit health care liabilities by moving to a defined contribution approach and give employees more control.”
To some observers, the growing interest in private health exchanges indicates that employers would be less likely to send their employees to the public exchanges to take advantage of public subsidies.
What we are seeing now is plenty of people who have been forced out of group health insurance plans looking to purchase individual insurance policies. As we approach 2014, when the bulk of ObamaCare kicks in, you will see employers dropping traditional group coverage.
To the extent they replace it with a defined contribution plan – or get out of the business of offering coverage to employees altogether – has yet to be seen. I think it will break along industry lines. Either way QuoteJuice will be well-positioned to serve this growing market.