Kotval
Private Health Insurance Exchanges are the Face of the Future to Manage Employee Benefit Programs...
By: Kristin L. Kotval | San Jose State University | May 13, 2014
As the healthcare industry changes because of the implementation of Obamacare Links to an external site. many employers are looking for solutions to drive healthcare costs down, but at the same time continue to offer competitive employee benefit programs to individuals and families. Many brokers throughout the country are trying to find the best solutions to the ramifications which Obamacare has caused for many United States based employers. New rules under Obamacare and the “Pay or Play” mandate Links to an external site.state that employers with 50 or more full-time employees need to offer health insurance to those eligible employees (Carrens, 2013). Although the “Pay or Play” mandate has been delayed by one year for employers over 100 employees and by two years for employers between 51 and 99 employees, employers are still trying to decide whether they should pay the penalty by not complying or play by implementing an employee benefit program in lieu of the applicable non-compliance penalty fees.
American’s want a healthcare system that works, is affordable, and offers a diverse package of health insurance products to all different types of health care consumers. To solidify the mess that Obamacare has created, Digital Insurance Links to an external site., which is one of the most technologically advanced employee benefits-only agencies in the United States, has built their own private marketplace named the Digital Benefits Marketplace (DBM). The DBM offers an online shopping experience to employees where they can purchase medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and voluntary products, such as critical illness and accident insurance on the marketplace from a defined contribution Links to an external site. amount set by the employer. Giving employees a defined contribution allows employees to shop for insurance through the private exchange and it helps them realize just how expensive the cost of healthcare actually is. They can use this defined contribution to purchase any benefits which suit their needs. However, if their benefit election exceeds the defined contribution threshold, employees will have to pay the remaining cost out of their own pocket. This buying tactic helps employees make better consumer decisions and it allows them to think about the benefits they actually need as opposed to the ones that they don’t.
With the roll out of the federal public exchange healthcare.gov Links to an external site.and the various public state exchanges such as, coveredca.com, Links to an external site.many broker firms around the country have decided to build their own private marketplace to gain a competitive advantage in the employee benefits/healthcare market. The private market exchanges will work very similarly to the public exchanges where they will offer empowerment to all employees to make the benefit choice that is right for each individual. Under Obamacare millions of Americans who have no coverage can receive up to $5,000 in tax subsidies to help them buy insurance through the public federal exchange. However, the public exchange will be operated by either the individual state (i.e. Covered California) or the federal government (i.e. Healthcare.gov) (Japsen, 2013). The biggest difference between federal public exchanges and private marketplaces is that only the federal exchange can offer tax credits to businesses and premium subsidies to individuals. There is no government assistance in the private marketplace. Today the public exchanges are built more for individuals who could not get insurance do to pre-existing conditions, do not have access to group insurance, and/or could not afford insurance.
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Although it may seem more attractive to go to the public exchange to receive government assistance, it is actually misleading because a person’s income needs to qualify in order to receive a tax subsidy. Currently, an individual who has an annual income that does not exceed 400% of the poverty level and does not have access to group benefits which meet the essential health benefit Links to an external site. standards and affordability Links to an external site. standards can qualify for a government subsidy. The only reason why an individual would go to the public exchange is because they qualify for a subsidy and/or do not have access to group insurance. Public exchanges offer benefits that are more expensive, have higher deductibles, higher out of pocket costs, and smaller networks of doctors and hospitals. Private exchanges offer more robust benefits, lower premium costs, lower out of pocket costs, and much larger networks of doctors and hospitals. Private exchanges were developed because of the Affordable Care Act and also to compete with the public exchanges. The private marketplaces tried to create comparable attributes of the online buying experience compared to public exchanges so that individuals and businesses could purchase better benefits, keep out of pocket costs low, and still use the same doctors and hospitals that they know and love.
To gain a better understanding of how the Digital Benefits Marketplace works and functions, I thought it would be beneficial to interview two experts within the Digital firm who play an integral role with the build out of the system, the functions of the platform, and the overall marketing and sales techniques used by Advisors and Producers within Digital to sell the DBM to consumers who are both current and future clients.
Our first expert is Jeff Fallick, who is a Managing Principal at Digital Benefit Advisors Links to an external site., a subsidiary company to Digital Insurance, and brings with him over 15 years of experience in the health insurance/employee benefits industry. Jeff’s role with the Digital Benefits Marketplace is to recruit and partner with elite health insurance carriers who will ultimately participate in the DBM. It is also Jeff’s responsibility to educate both existing and future clients about the DBM and how this can be a viable solution for an employer to manage their employee benefit program.
Our second expert is Mike Sullivan, who is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer to Digital Insurance and brings with him more than 25 years of leadership experience in the insurance and distribution space to manage sales and marketing for Digital Insurance. He is also responsible for strategy development in response to emerging opportunities relating to Obamacare. Since the year 2000, Mike Sullivan has helped position Digital Insurance as the largest and most innovative brokerage solution for small- and medium-sized employers across the United States.
Since Obamacare has gone into full effect it has drawn plenty of media attention, with most of that attention being negative because of consumer unhappiness with the public health insurance exchanges. Due to the unsuccessful nature of the public exchanges, many health insurance carriers and brokers have decided to implement their own private market exchange which offers better benefits and stronger networks of doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies in comparison to the Obamacare public market exchange. Technological systems are socially produced and social production is culturally informed. Internet culture is characterized by a four-layer structure: the techno-meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the virtual communitarian culture, and the entrepreneurial culture. When you combine these cultures they contribute to an ideology of freedom that is widespread in the internet world. The culture of the internet is a culture made up of a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology (Castells, 2001). It is because of these four aspects of internet culture that has allowed individuals and technology to build the online shopping experience through a private exchange.
The techno-meritocratic culture makes technology based projects possible because it sets rules and customs into networks of cooperation (Castells, 2001). Hacker culture is made up of “hackers” otherwise known as computer geniuses who create software and security measures. Hackers have played a large role in the software development of both the public and private exchanges. Virtual communitarian culture adds a social aspect to technology sharing (Castells, 2001). Users of the private and public exchanges make up this social aspect. Lastly, the entrepreneurial culture diffuses these internet practices in all domains of society as a way of making money (Castells, 2001). Digital Benefit Advisors used an entrepreneurial approach when they developed their own private market exchange to make a profit by making the private marketplace available to healthcare consumers all over the United States.
Potential benefits of the private marketplaces include, but are not limited to reducing trend costs of healthcare, reducing administrative burdens in an increasingly complex regulatory environment, and expanding the amount of benefit choices available to employees while allowing those employees to spend their defined employer contribution towards whichever benefits they feel are necessary for themselves and their families (Howard, 2014). The DBM enables employers who engage in the use of the network platform to offer comprehensive benefits at a fixed cost while eliminating the time and challenges which come with benefits implementation and administration.
Graham Meikle and Sherman Young describe two main senses in which media firms can be described as convergent. The first of these describes the ongoing process of consolidation and expansion through which global media firms become larger, more integrated and more networked. The second describes the ways in which media firms are adopting and adapting to the potential of technological convergence. Media are predominantly a business and major trends such as globalization, digitization, networking, and deregulation have all transformed the business world (Meikle & Young, 2012). Media convergence has allowed the insurance industry to expand, consolidate, and integrate public exchanges to better service healthcare consumers. According to Jeff Fallick, “The Digital Benefits Marketplace is a vehicle for employers primarily in the 50 to 500 employee range to set up an online store of health insurance products which allocates a certain dollar amount for employees to purchase the appropriate plans for his or her family.”
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According to The Economist, the technology industry has a history of bitter rivalries, but it is those rivalries that shape the market today (Technology Giants at War, 2012). As the web becomes something that lives through a smart phone, and software handled in a cloud, the clear lines that once defined territories and strategies are blurring. A mixture of threat and opportunity has led industries into uninhabited lands and sometimes into places where some other firm is used to controlling. It is this type of integration that will heavily impact the future and the ways that people retrieve information, consume content, make purchases, and determine who takes the money in return (Technology Giants at War, 2012). Technology has evolved in many ways and as of late it has enabled the insurance industry to sell healthcare products through an online marketplace. According to Jeff Fallick, “Other firms such as Aon Links to an external site. and Towers Watson Links to an external site.have also built their own private marketplace, but what is special and unique about the Digital Benefits Marketplace is that in addition to the online shopping platform, we also combine the local knowledge of each Digital Benefit Advisors office, in our case it is Los Altos, but we have 25 markets all over the country. The local Advisors are working with the Chief Financial Officers and the heads of HR to pick the appropriate store if you will, which plans and which carriers go into the exchange and then you have the local support during the enrollment process."
Many Americans are worried about the future of healthcare and there are many individuals who do not believe in the government exchange programs. Digital's innovative ideas and technology which were used to develop their own branded private exchange is just what consumers need today. According to Mike Sullivan,
"My consensus is that if we can move incrementally on this path to private exchanges in the marketplace and support that with the right customer experience, then employers will recognize the benefits of a private marketplace and the private market share. Digital Insurance is going to try to stay in front of the ways private exchanges innovate. We are looking at what can we build, what can we outsource, and what do we need to buy to create the most compelling and potentially the most constructive, competitive, and advanced private marketplace around. Our goal is to innovate, our goal is to bring the employer decision down to individuals and families, change employee behavior when electing and using benefits, and empower employees to make their own decisions and selections based on their own unique lifestyle. We think the end game long term is that our marketplace will continue to need capital investment, time, technology, and innovative capability. Most agencies will find that they just can’t do it, but at Digital Insurance as a Fortune 500 company, we have the means to invest in the future of our private marketplace, and with that we will."
Both Jeff Fallick and Mike Sullivan are determined to make the Digital Benefits Marketplace the most successful online buying platform and benefits administration system available to large and middle-market employers. It is Digital’s innovative technology, product branding, and state of the art product platform which makes the Digital Benefits Marketplace the most successful and reliable solution to getting ahead of Obamacare and offering affordable health coverage alternatives to employers, individuals, and families.
The interview with Jeff Fallick took place on Thursday, March 27, 2014 and the interview with Mike Sullivan took place on Tuesday, April 1, 2014. Both Fallick and Sullivan work collaboratively together to ensure that the DBM offers well respected insurance carriers, an abundance of employee benefit options, while maintaining affordable costs, and a hassle free user friendly online platform to be used by both employers and employees. After warmly conversing with both Jeff Fallick and Mike Sullivan, our conversations are edited here for space and clarity.
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Can you explain to me what the Digital Benefits Marketplace is? Why did Digital Insurance decide to brand its own private market exchange? How long has the Digital Benefits Marketplace been available to clients?
FALLICK: The Digital benefit Marketplace is a vehicle for employers primarily in the 50 to 500 employee range to set up a store of health insurance products which allocates a certain dollar amount for employees to purchase the appropriate plans for his or her family.
The Affordable care Act otherwise known as Obamacare has put a lot of extra burden and a lot of extra cost on employers. There are now taxes and fees and the cost of healthcare keeps going up. Rather than staring at trend increases which are typically around 12%, employers each year change carriers, change plans, employers pay more, and their employees pay more
The marketplace was effective early January of this year.
SULLIVAN: Sure, so the Digital Benefits Marketplace is an online marketplace for employers, and individuals and families to purchase insurance products at the group level and at the individual level which creates an online shopping experience for insurance products.
There is a whole thought around the fact that if you are going to build a marketplace and if you are going to be an exclusive user in that marketplace you need to brand it and try to raise brand awareness around it. Early on when we started to do this another firm was using a “rental” marketplace so we wanted to grant separation from “rental” marketplaces and brand our own private marketplace to offer an effective employee benefit solution to our clients and prospects.
How is the Digital Benefits Marketplace structured? How does it work? What types of benefits will be offered in the Digital Benefits Marketplace?
FALLICK: The structure is that it is built on Plan Source technology which is an online benefits administration system, so no more paper. There are decision support tools that help vector the employees through the process whether it is HMO, PPO, or High Deductible plans based on a risk tolerance, risk assessment, any types of medications they are taking, etc, etc. That is also supported by a local call center to help employees throughout the process.
The core benefits offered will always be health insurance, that’s the biggest cost driver and is most important to employees, but dental insurance, vision, life, short-term and long-term disability, other voluntary products or ancillary products such as accident and cancer plans, and even pet insurance will be an option.
SULLIVAN: It is structured to offer online rating, quoting, and side by side product configuration so that people who are looking to buy insurance can comparatively shop online based on the pricing of various products. It has an employer contribution bucket that allows for the viewing of those dollars for employees to shop around for the plans that are best for them.
At the group level our marketplace will offer disability, life, health, dental, vision, and number of voluntary products including accident supplemental insurance and cancer supplemental insurance. Our hope is to broaden our online marketplace/store plan offerings overtime.
How was the Digital Benefits Marketplace built? What are the key components that are included with the marketplace? How do employers and employees use the marketplace?
FALLICK: The underlying architecture is Plan Source which is a well respected benefit system that also has a payroll function as well, but it really is about the technology that allows for the shopping experience along with the decision support tools and each of those after the enrollment election process is done it will feed directly into the carrier of which the employee chooses.
Employers who are going through the open enrollment process or if it is a new hire, they will send out a link to new employees that includes a welcome letter which tells them how to log on, what their username and password is, change your password and go onto the Digital Benefits Marketplace to elect your plans.
SULLIVAN: Basically software that creates the online shopping experience and it’s an entire team of people who are negotiating contracts with insurance carriers who will participate in the private marketplace and will ultimately put their product on our online shelf for purchase.
What is the purpose of a Private marketplace? Are there other brokerages that are also using their own private marketplace? What is special or unique about the Digital Benefits Marketplace compared to its competitors?
FALLICK: The purpose of the marketplace is to empower consumers/employees to make their own buying decisions as it pertains to healthcare and to recognize how expensive it is to purchase insurance.
Some of the really really big firms such as Aon and Towers Watson have come out with their exchanges, but ours is a little different because they are writing their own paper and are underwriting their own products and some of them are self-funded.
What is special and unique about the Digital Benefits Marketplace is that combining the local knowledge of each Digital Benefit Advisors office, in our case it is Los Altos, but we have 25 markets all over the country. The local Advisors who are working with the Chief Financial Officers and the heads of HR to pick the appropriate store if you will, which plans and which carriers go into the exchange and then you have the local support during the enrollment process. Whereas a lot of other agencies, as good as they might be, I am not sure where that end service lies, where with us we are keeping it all self-contained.
SULLIVAN: To basically migrate what is the traditional offline purchasing framework to an online shopping experience it gives employees broader choices and allows employers to give broader contributions to the individual and employee level.
There are other brokers who are developing their own private marketplaces, but what is unique is that we are making our marketplace available to small and middle-market employers, whereas other brokers are focusing their marketplace launch in the large employer segment. The first thing is the market segment that we are going after, the second thing is rather than just creating an online buying experience we are also offering consulting and advisory services and solutions through an integrated call center where users of the marketplace can call and speak to a live human and voice their questions and concerns.
What is the difference between the federal public market exchange and your own private market exchange? How are they similar? How will public exchanges impact the success of private exchanges?
FALLICK: That’s a good question. The Federal Exchange, well I do not want to make any jokes because there were a lot of problems right out of the gate with technology issues and people not being able to purchase insurance, but it was really designed for individuals and predominant buyers who happen to be those who never had insurance, couldn’t get insurance, or couldn’t afford insurance and now they can go to the exchange and get a subsidy Links to an external site. based upon where their income stands against the poverty level which is no more than 400% above the level and then for small businesses up to 50 employees maybe in two years it will go up to 99, but these employers who go to the small business exchange may qualify for a government tax credit Links to an external site.. The federal exchange is a place where plans are now guaranteed issue Links to an external site. and employers can receive tax credits and individuals can receive premium subsidies. Our private exchange is different because we focus on groups at the mid market level who want to add value and bring a new shopping experience to their employees.
The only similarities between the public exchange and our private exchange include having multiple price points, choice, and leveraging technology to purchase insurance, and that’s pretty much where it ends
Based on the rocky start of the public exchanges people may be apprehensive about private exchanges because of the bad tastes that the public exchanges left in ones mouth and they may confuse the two. It is our job in our local office and our marketing team to really differentiate what we are compared to the public exchange.
SULLIVAN: The biggest difference between the federal public exchange and the private marketplaces is that only the federal exchange can offer tax credits to businesses and premium subsidies to individuals who are considered lower income. There is no government assistance in the private marketplace. Today the public exchanges are built more for individuals and there are only a few states that are offering small employer benefits through a public exchange.
Private exchanges were developed because of the Affordable Care Act and also to compete with the public exchanges. The private marketplaces tried to create comparable attributes relative to the buying experience compared to public exchanges.
In what ways does the Digital Benefits Marketplace help an employer become more efficient with the way they offer a benefit program to employees? How does it give more flexibility to employees when they make benefit elections? Explain to me what is meant by defined contribution and how is it more cost effective to a company?
FALLICK: Another great question. Many employers are still using paper enrollments which based on handwriting and other errors can slow up the enrollment process. Using online enrollment underlying technology will not be 100% accurate, but will take a lot of those errors out and which will allow for a more seamless and administrational at the employer level and on the carrier side.
Defined Contribution is definitely prevalent in large companies who employ thousands of employees and up. Think of it as a cafeteria plan where you are given a fixed amount of money and you can do either lump summed or tiered. Lump sum would be if you have 50 employees and your benefits costs are $50,000 a year so you give every employee $1,000 to buy their insurance. What we are recommending and are finding to be the most common contribution is the tiered allocation where if you have an employee only they get $500 per month, employee plus spouse gets $1,000 per month, employee plus children gets $1,500 per month, and employee plus family gets $2,000 per month. You can break that up between medical, dental, vision, and such.
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SULLIVAN: The very nature of creating an online shopping experience is to eliminate a paper based system and replace it with an online platform buying experience where software replaces a lot of the offline activities. It eliminates the need for paper applications and enrollments are fed directly to the carriers from the online benefit administration platform. It also creates a side by side shopping experience and electronic processing. Employers can also use the benefit administration platform to process employee additions and terminations, which eliminates the usage of paper carrier forms.
Employers are also able to set a defined contribution strategy for their employees where employers can directly define or structure a budget around how much they are going to contribute or how much am I going to define as my contribution to an employee to allow them to shop around on the private marketplace to purchase the lines of insurance they choose.
What do employers want out of private exchanges besides lower costs? Why are private exchanges a better way of providing benefit programs to employees? What tools are available to employers through the Digital Benefits Marketplace?
FALLICK: There will be several tools and some are still being flushed out, but with the buying process and the decision support making tool which is technology that will help an employee gauge what is the appropriate plan for him or her. This is really important because there will be different networks of doctors. Right now with a full network you can go wherever you want. Full network plans will be more expensive and skinny network plans will be less expensive. Someone who is 24 years old and fresh out of college may benefit from a skinny network plan because they may or may not have a preference in who their provider is an by choosing the smaller network they can save on premium cost. There will also be online consulting docs where you can do an evisit and such like that. There will be other tools to communicate with doctors and networks as well.
SULLIVAN: My belief is that employers want to at a fundamental level get out of having to make all the choices for a diverse employee population, where the employer tends to head towards the middle. Most employers try to create a benefit program that falls somewhere in the middle to satisfy a vast majority of people. Employers today have to make every decision and communicate every change that is made each year to its employees. They have to try to problem solve for a diverse group of individuals with a neutral solution. Individuals and families understand better what their needs actually are better than employers do, so by offering the private market exchange it empowers employees to make these decisions and it allows employers to step away from the decision making process. It is a highly innovative approach to offering an employee benefit program that is diverse enough to satisfy all of the needs of employees without having to choose neutrally fitting employee benefit options.
How do you recruit health insurance carriers to be a part of the Digital Benefits Marketplace? How do you choose what plans will be offered in the Digital Benefits Marketplace? In what ways are doctor, pharmacy, and hospital networks affected in the Digital Benefits Marketplace?
FALLICK: As brokers we obviously get paid a commission and we do not want to cut ourselves off and make less, but we all also realize that we are all in this together and employers and doctors, hospitals, and everyone else has been feeling the pinch if you will of the rising costs of healthcare and the Affordable Care Act. We are trying to be a good partner to our insurance carriers to deliver to them clean and efficient business that is hopefully more profitable and better distributed which drives costs down from an administrative standpoint.
Plan options will be chosen by the employer. There will be 12 to 15 plan options by carrier and we would sit down with HR and the owners and from there they will narrow down the options for employees to choose from.
Networks will not be affected because we are still leveraging to the same networks, doctors, and hospitals that each of the carriers’ contract with directly.
SULLIVAN: That is a big part of my job. We are trying to convey the weight of Digital Insurance and Digital Benefit Advisors around the fact that we are the largest employee benefits only broker in the country who manages small to middle market business and we have the financial means and the operational capabilities to build our own private market exchange. And so, we talk to and communicate with carriers everyday to try to persuade them to put their products in our store and by large there has only been one carrier out of the whole country we have approached who said no.
We work with our carrier partners to choose plans for our marketplace which have been first off filed and approved by the state, and then we choose ten or more plans which are the most popular and which sell most often. We then choose amongst those carrier plans to develop an online carrier portfolio from which employees can shop from on our marketplace.
What sales tactics are you using to sell the Digital Benefits Marketplace to clients and prospect clients? Country wide about many clients do you have on the Digital Benefits Marketplace platform today? What do you expect the client participation to be one year from now?
FALLICK: That’s the million dollar question right, how to distribute. There is a perception even to this day that it was assumed that insurance was too complex of a buying decision to be made online. However, I challenge that assumption because we see people today buying cars online, making investments online, buying stock online, and other financial vehicles. Whereas insurance is confusing, but the role of the consultant is still here for those who would like to do an online chat and say, “I am on the marketplace and I need help.” As sales people and what we are trying to do is make our clients more educated and keep their costs fixed and with prospects that are sick of the constant 12% increase year after year, this allows them a solution to lower their costs and empower employees to decide what benefits are best for them at a cost perspective and coverage perspective.
A year from now is hard to say, but it has been said that by 2020 70% of people will be purchasing healthcare online through private exchanges. I do not think we will get to that number overnight, but we will see in our local market and with our clients who employee between 50 and 500 employees, I can see between twenty and thirty percent of those clients on our Digital Benefits Marketplace platform within a year.
SULLIVAN: Well, we developed online and offline collateral and materials; we developed marketing, communications, and public relations strategies; we have local webinars and seminars that are going on monthly around various markets around the country to try and gain greater awareness; we are training Digital Benefit Advisors staff to help them better understand how to talk about the Digital Benefits Marketplace; and we educate our staff on the pros and cons of our private marketplace versus both public and other private marketplaces around the country. We are basically trying to educate both internally and externally the benefits of our private exchange and getting dedicated sales resources to get out there and talk about this as much as possible. We also have a business development team that has been doing outbound telemarketing campaigns to teach to sales producers when they are talking to clients or approaching prospects.
Our goal is to write business for 100 more groups buy the end of 2014.
Why do you believe the Digital Benefits Marketplace is the best option for employers? What do you think the private exchanges will look like in the future? How will Digital Insurance adapt to future changes to ensure that their marketplace continues to be successful and competitive?
FALLICK: Predictability and with defined contribution you are setting up your costs that you can control each year in a much more predictable manner. You are allowing employee choice, you are embracing technology, and you are providing consumerism at a very tangible real level so employees can understand how expensive it is to purchase insurance and to utilize their benefits program.
The whole industry needs to learn how to evolve and it is our job to bring information back to our product development team about specifics in our local market. What is happening here in Silicon Valley may be entirely different than what is happening in Atlanta or Raleigh or Connecticut. So, it is our job to give them that information and it’s their job make sure that at a local and national level and a compliance level as to what is happening with the all the changes so that we are all working in concert together to make sure that clients every day, month, and year have the most up to date information on plans, products, you name it, on the exchange to make sure the options are viable for the long haul.
SULLIVAN: I think that the Digital Benefits Marketplace for small and mid-size employers represents the best scale between incremental change to a platform that was built to engage at an individual and family level. To help people transition from the traditional employee benefit program where plans are preselected by the employer to a platform that allows an online shopping experience made to customize an employee benefit program which allows for diversity between employee wants and needs. I think this is the right balance and the right incremental step towards the future so that it is powerful for both employers and individuals and families alike. My consensus is that if we can move incrementally on this path to private exchanges in the marketplace and support that with the right customer experience, then employers will recognize the benefits of a private marketplace and the private market share.
Digital Insurance is going to try to stay out in front of the ways private exchanges innovate, so we are looking at what can we build, what can we outsource, and what do we need to buy to create the most compelled, and potentially build a constructive, competitive, and advanced private marketplace. So, our goal is to innovate, our goal is to bring the employer decision down to individuals and families, and try to change employee behavior when electing and using benefits, and try to educate and empower employees to make their own decisions and selections based on their own unique lifestyle. We think the end game long term is that this marketplace will continue to take scale, capital investment, time, technology, and innovative capability. Most agencies will find that they just can’t do it, but at Digital Insurance as a Fortune 500 Company, we are willing to invest in the future of our private marketplace, and with that we will.
References:
Carrens, A. (2013, November 19). Private exchanges rise as healthcare options. The New York Times. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/your-money/private-exchanges-rise-as-health-care-options.html?pagewanted=all Links to an external site.
Castells, M, (2002). The internet galaxy: Reflections of the internet, business, and society. New York, NY: Oxford University Press
Howard, P. (2014, January 24). Private health insurance exchanges unleash ‘transformational change’. Forbes. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/01/24/private-health-insurance-exchanges-unleash-transformational-change/ Links to an external site.
Japsen, B. (2013, April 15). Insurers flock to private exchanges while states grapple with Obamacare marketplace. Forbes. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/04/15/insurers-flock-to-private-exchanges-while-states-grapple-with-obamacare-marketplace/ Links to an external site.
Meikle, G., & Young, S. (2012). Media convergence. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Technology giants at war. (2012, November 29). The Economist. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://www.economist.com/news/21567361-google-apple-facebook-and-amazon-are-each-others-throats-all-sorts-ways-another-game Links to an external site.Instructure, makers of the open source learning management system Canvas Help Privacy policy Terms of service Facebook Links to an external site. Twitter Links to an external site.