The most telling statistic for me: 42% of respondents were not even aware of the current status of the ACA law, which means they probably don't even know that there are significant changes in the health insurance world coming up this fall when open enrollment begins.
It immediately suggests a couple of key principles for how insurance companies, brokers, and employers move forward into their post-ACA business.
1. Education. Education. Education. View every constituent contact as an opportunity to engage and educate as to what's coming down the road.
2. Explain everything. When you've been in the trenches of implementing healthcare reform changes, the alphabet soup of acronyms becomes an insiders shorthand: EHB, APTC, CSR, even ACA itself. In any external communications, spell it out and explain what it is in the simple language possible. The changes themselves are hard enough to make sense of: don't let language make it harder.
3. Keep it simple. When trying to decide between different possible approaches or designs, always start with this question: what will make this easiest on our brokers, our employers, and our members?
4. Provide continuity: There is a temptation when contemplating changes as broad as the ones that ACA-features like Exchanges and member-level rating to take that opportunity to overhaul the whole way you do business. But, there's a danger in changing too much too fast. If you can keep your interactions, your communications, and processes as similar as possible to the way they currently function, that will help ease your constituents into the new post-ACA way of doing things.
And, don't forget the network effect. The largest single source that Kaiser's poll respondents cited as to where they get their information about health care reform law is from conversations with friends and family. If you can effectively reach those people you do make contact with, they'll help spread the word to everyone else.
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