Commonwealth Fund Report Attacks Medicare Agents

[NF Insight]

A recent report by The Commonwealth Fund puts forward that Independent Medicare Agents not only do Medicare recipients a disservice by offering a narrow selection of plans, but additionally do not educate clients about critical Medicare elements beyond plan selection. Bill defends the Medicare Agent by walking through the issues with this article, as well as the hidden motivations that caused the authors to publish it.

 

[gregj]

I like the marketing rebound Bill attempts here to springboard off the Commonwealth Fund's recent "report", which as Bill eventually notes is a lowkey infomercial for something called Saeidan (& almost certainly paid for by them).

Bill's right to call out Commonwealth Fund for, well, let's call it being "inadequately transparent" about the nature of this "report" & its "complicated" authorship.

He's less right about the particular agendas of Commonwealth Fund & it's "co-author"/benefactor Saeidan. 501(c)(3) nonprofits like CF are prohibited from being "organized or operated for the benefit of private interests", but those rules are sufficiently vague that CF & many many other 501(c)(3)s skate on this kind of thing. And as Bill notes, Saeidan hopes to have some kind of role in advising beneficiaries itself -- and IT will not represent every plan in every market, either.

But it's neither CF nor Saeidan that keeps advisors from "representing" every plan in a marketplace. Maybe who is, and why that is the way it is, should be the subject of CF's next "report" on this topic.

 

[LostDollar]

But it's neither CF nor Saeidan that keeps advisors from "representing" every plan in a marketplace. Maybe who is, and why that is the way it is, should be the subject of CF's next "report" on this topic.

I think he was pretty clear about that. It is the agent-and one would presume in some cases-the agent's advisors such as their IMO/FMO-who relate the plans to market conditions and provide the prospects with a few choices that are likely to have the best combination of options-networks, customer service, meds and so forth. I also see discussion on the forum that indicate to me that agents have knowledge about which plans (after intial issue) are more likely to take heart conditions, diabetes, certain medications and so on. And this will vary by state, AND I don't think ship counselors are allowed to recommend specific plans.

An agent in a large metropolitan area is NOT going to be a good senior market insurance agent just because they have a contract to sell (ie "represent") every single Medigap and Medicare Advantage plan offered in every zip code of the metropolitan area.

 

[Bill_Kiray]

There were two things that got me so upset in the report that I just had to record this episode.

1 - Criticizing an Independent Insurance agent who chooses not to offer 100% of the plans in their market.
2 - The blatant hypocrisy of the authors in trying to cast doubt on the agent in order to gain support/interest/funding for their tool that they are developing.

Some agents are better than others at educating their consumers beyond plan selection, but to assert that most are only focused on plan selection was completely self serving and simply inaccurate.