A Prescription for ... Change
The health reform bill and changing demographics are helping drive carriers' offerings and strategies.
Insurance Networking News, 07/01/2010
The passage of the health care reform bill in March may not have triggered UnitedHealthcare, a unit of Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealth Group, to offer a special plan for Spanish-speaking Americans. Yet, the health care firm's rollout and vast expansion of its Spanish-language offering, PlanBien, responded to the same reality: the face of America is changing, and millions of Americans are both working and uninsured. The number of Hispanics in the United States has boomed to total some 47 million, and, according to the Department of Labor, they represent the fastest growing segment of the workforce. At the same time, 32% of Hispanics in the country lack insurance, doubling the figure for whites (in 2007), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile the reform bill, with its raft of new regulations, is prodding insurers to expand coverage to uninsured youth, and to usher forth other new offerings for retirees and various underserved demographics. Analysts see such compliance pressures and the desire to appeal to the burgeoning Hispanic population, along with the drive to forge alliances and create eco-friendly policies, as among the central trends shaping the kinds of products and services that health insurers will offer in the near term and, consequently, the corresponding technologies they will implement to facilitate these launches.
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Culturally Sensitive Products
Launched in July 2008 to residents in South Florida, PlanBien is a suite of plans for employers designed by UnitedHealthcare to meet the health needs ofits Spanish-speaking members.PlanBien takes into account the particular health concerns-such as the high rate of diabetes-of the Latino community. Within the past year and a half, PlanBien has expanded to serve Latinos in Texas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Arizona and New Mexico.The plannow covers almost 40,000 individuals,with more than 300 businesses offering PlanBien, according to Russell Bennett, VP of Latino health solutions for UnitedHealthcare.
With approximately 50% of Hispanics in the United States preferring to speak Spanish at home, UnitedHealthcare's approach is vital for winning over Hispanic clients, says Bennett. "Many of the working uninsured are uninsuredin partbecause of their lack of understanding of insurance," says Bennett. "So PlanBien positions UnitedHealthcare very wellin the marketbecause we have a whole infrastructure in place to help people understand and more appropriately use their health insurance."
PlanBien has spawned a wealth of associated products and technologies for UnitedHealthcare. This includes a bilingual call center in San Antonio-which is receiving 4,000 to 6,000 calls in Spanish per month-and continuing education courses on offering health insurance to the Hispanic workforce.
Additionally, withthe support of Hispanic-owned vendor Sensis Agency, UnitedHealthcare has created a series of offerings on the Internet, including itswebsite, www.uhclatino.com. The site, which enables users to toggle back and forth between English and Spanish on any page, received 19,000 unique visitors in April, a company record for the bilingual website that vastly exceeded the 4,000 visitors per month it was receiving just three years earlier. In February, UnitedHealthcare also began offering podcasts in Spanish. Ultimately, it aims to expand PlanBien into four or five more states so thatemployees can more easily and effectively use theirhealth insurance. "In each one of our markets, we take a sample portfolio of our best-selling products, and wrap those products with a full set of bilingual materials and customer service," explains Bennett.
Partnerships South of the Border
Health insurers such as UnitedHealthcare and Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna also have forged alliances to create plans that serve Latinos across the U.S.'s southern border. In May, Aetna announced a health plan for employers that provides employees and their families who live or work within San Diego County with access to more than 200 doctors and health care facilities in the Mexican communities of Mexicali, Tecate and Tijuana, as well as in California. Aetna recognized that many workers living in southern California have family members in Mexico, or spend time there part of the year, so they need to access care, explains Kathleen Dibble, Aetna's head of sales and service, small group, California.
Aetna forged the deal with Sistemas Medicos Nacionales, S.A. de C.V. (Simnsa), a major health maintenance organization program in Northern Mexico that is licensed in California. "People in Mexico seem to be familiar with [Simnsa]-they are a known entity down there, and they had forged this relationship with other competitors as well," says Dibble. UnitedHealthcare and others also have joined forces with Simnsa. To make the materials related to its new plan both culturally and linguistically sensitive, Aetna developed documents and customer service in both Spanish and English. Aetna, too, has a Spanish language website so members can search for participating doctors and hospitals.
