By Samantha Wright
Analysts predict that the post-Affordable Care Act healthcare marketplace will eventually develop a robust appetite for integrated insurance products – many of which have already come online.
Things have not moved dramatically in that direction, yet.
“But, they will,” predicted Joshua Stein, President of U.S. Healthcare for IronHealth, Ironshore's healthcare liability underwriting division. “And they will specifically in terms of integration of risk. A lot of these areas of exposure that we have specific products for will all begin to meld together.”
For now, however, the healthcare liability market is so profitable, and has so much excess capacity, that there is not much incentive for insureds to change their buying habits.
“We talk a lot about the business evolving, on our end, to a more integrated risk solution mentality, but the buyers aren’t really focused on that yet,” Stein said. “It might take a while before the emergence of loss involving integrated exposures drives a change to the way buyers think about risk.”
Likewise, the insurance industry’s collective assumption that there would be a significant uptick in the amount of managed care exposures in the Obamacare marketplace does not appear to have manifested, as of yet.
“We thought that Affordable Care Organizations were going to be a more dominant factor in the industry,” said Brad Rosgen, healthcare practice leader for Burns & Wilcox, the largest independent wholesale broker and underwriting manager in the US. “But we just haven’t seen that level of adoption, that level of exposure out there in the marketplace that we thought we would.”
What Rosgen is seeing, however, is an unprecedented level of case management – follow-through and follow-up – by proactive health care facilities and health insurers that are trying to better manage the quality of the outcomes they are providing after they send their patients home.
“We are seeing nurses calling or actually following up in person with patients a lot of the time now, after they are discharged from the hospital, or treated and given an after-care plan, to make sure they actually are doing what was asked of them,” said Rosgen.
This, in turn, is creating new exposures that weren’t seen in healthcare before, beyond what would generally be classified as the core exposure of whatever a provider does, and an appetite for very robust plans that continue beyond an insured’s own walls.
“I like to see that happening,” Rosgen said. “I think that improves the healthiness of the population in general, and creates a better and more proactive insured. That was one of the perceived benefits that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to have; it was supposed to improve the quality of outcomes overall.”
