This month, we want to put a bit of positivity in the air regarding one of our health insurance providers, UnitedHealthcare. Don’t get me wrong, we work with many insurance providers, and we are in no way, shape, or form saying UHC is the single silver bullet solution for every employer. As a matter of fact, that doesn’t exist. We’ll tell you the same thing that our counterparts at UHC would say to you – they are not a fit for every employer. Nobody is.
As you can imagine, we have clients with just about every insurance company. This is because every employer is different and has different pools of employees with varying risk and claim profiles. Ultimately, all insurance and stop-loss providers have different underwriting appetites, so you have to be willing and able to bark up different trees for clients. Shout out to Evie, our resident barker🐶.
We are not and never will be in the habit of doing what is easy and quick. We wouldn’t have just celebrated our 11th anniversary if we did that, and we also wouldn’t have the long-term client relationships that we do have, some dating darn near back to day one when we started the company.
With all that said, we try to match our clients with the best provider possible, and when you have done that and done it successfully, you can enjoy good long-term runs with the insurance providers. We don’t know if we did anything special last year that others weren’t or if UHC just got better at pricing their programs. Or maybe even UHC’s blocks of businesses in the small and medium-sized markets here in Texas are finally profitable enough for them that they don’t have to deliver crazy renewals. I honestly don’t know, and rarely does an insurer provide the “secrets” as to what’s going on. Still, in late 2021 and the first half of 2022, we are seeing better renewals from UHC than we’ve ever seen.
Five or six years ago, when UHC first rolled out AllSavers, we were early adopters, but we had to move to other vendors after year one because the renewals did not make sense for many of our clients. On the contrary, this year, we have seen really good renewals from UHC, so much to the point that it made me want to talk about it. I feel like, hopefully, we’ve turned a corner with them. For some clients, we expected them to have some pretty bad renewals because they had horrible claims losses, but we were pleasantly surprised when the renewals were issued, and they weren’t bad at all.
So again, just trying to put some positivity out in the universe because there’s not enough, especially in our industry. There will always be issues, and problems with insurance providers, especially given the personal and emotional nature of what they insure and how many people and entities are involved in the process, but I wanted to share some successes we saw this year with many of our 2nd and 3rd-year renewals with UHC.
We work with some amazing people over there, and they know who they are, and we appreciate all of their hard work and support that they provide our staff to provide our mutual clients the best experience possible.
If there are any vendor spotlights or things you’d like to see us touch on, please let us know. We’re more than happy to shed insights on anything you would like to hear about (within reason, of course!).
