ACA Cost Concerns Offer Payers a Member Engagement Opportunity
Cost-conscious ACA consumers present payers with opportunities to improve member engagement and target services to improve profitability.
Source: Thinkstock
By - Consumers purchasing health insurance through the ACA exchanges are likely to actively seek out lower-cost options when enrolling or re-enrolling in individual health plans, says new data from GAO, giving payers a chance to practice their member engagement skills.
Seventy percent of ACA individual health plan enrollees manually re-enrolled into a new plan, while only 30 percent of 2016 ACA enrollees automatically re-enrolled in their health plans, indicating that payers who actively message cost-conscious plan shoppers may be able to increase their market share.
Only 39 percent of manual re-enrollees remained with their previous health plan while 61 percent switched to an entirely different plan.
Manual ACA re-enrollees sought plans that had slower growth in their monthly premiums, which means that payers looking to enter into the individual health plan market may attract more consumers by offering health plans with stable month-to-month premiums.
GAO added that these findings were persistent with previous suggestions from the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) which indicated that cost savings are a high priority for consumers who manually re-enroll.
“ASPE found that average net monthly premium for the 61 percent of consumers who actively switched plans in 2016 was $132, which represented an average savings of $42 per month compared to what they would have paid if they stayed in their same or similar crosswalked plans,” GAO added.
Payers can leverage outreach tactics and new technologies that inform individual health plan seekers of cost-friendly health plan options and encourage these potential consumers to switch from their previous health plan.
Eighty-nine payer executives reported investing in customer service professionals and technologies that help collect data on beneficiary needs, a recent Change Healthcare survey found. Forty-three percent of payer executives reported success in improving beneficiary engagement when they used beneficiary data to tailor digital communications via email, website, mobile apps, and text message.
Designing enrollment interfaces and delivering information to enrollees as they purchase health insurance is an effective way to guide, inform, and appeal to potential beneficiaries.
Optimized buying experiences, with easy-to-use point of sale systems and information-friendly interfaces, help build consumer trust with a payer’s organization’s brand and assists payers in learning about beneficiaries’ buying behaviors and preferred products.
Healthcare marketing tactics such as creating strong consumer profiles to identify the best potential customer and using current beneficiary data to develop outreach materials can be adjusted to the individual health plan market. A marketing strategy should communicate to individual plan customers about a health plan’s cost-effective benefits as well as affordable premium amounts.
Payers that combine intuitive buying experiences with health plan management on mobile platforms will stand out among younger beneficiaries looking to buy individual health plans, says David Biel, the US Leader of Health Plan Consulting at Deloitte.
“How does a health plan bring all the parties together for the consumer in order to help them navigate the whole system? A health plan is going to differentiate itself and capture a consumer’s heart and mind by getting them connected to their providers, pharmacy, and other services,” Biel said.
Payers have ample opportunity to leverage these strategies to capture the individual consumer market even with the significant policy changes of the 2018 open enrollment period. The new policies may even propel many payers to break into the individual market if they can address gaps in marketing, outreach, and individual health plan consumer engagement.
