The private Medicare plan market is doing much better than many other insurance markets, and insurers and distributors still have room to improve Medicare plan marketing strategies.
Speakers gave agents and brokers a peek inside the machinery last week, during a webinar organized by Connecture Inc.
Connecture offers systems that insurers and exchange managers can use to get people into insurance plans, including Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement (Medigap) insurance plans.
George Dippel, a senior vice president at Deft Research, talked about his company's consumer survey data.
Connecture executives talked about what they seen when they look at data for their own health plan customers' web shoppers.
Hurricanes, low interest rates and turmoil in Washington have been hurting the performance of many insurance markets, including the individual major medical market for people under 65.
In the Medicare plan market, the regulatory framework has been stable, increases in claim expenses have been modest, and baby boomers have been turning 65.
Connecture reported in December that the number of people enrolling in coverage through its systems during the Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D drug plan annual enrollment period for 2018, which ran from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7, was 18% higher than the number who enrolled through the company's systems for 2017.
During the webinar, Connecture executives reported that the number of consumers shopping through the web increased 32%.
The conversion rate, or likelihood that a Medicare plan web shopper would actually buy coverage, increased 30%.
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More information about the webinar is available here.
Here are three more Medicare plan shopper insights, drawn from Dippel's remarks and slidedeck, and from the Connecture executives' slidedeck.
1. When people shop for Medicare plans is changing.
Only 24% of Deft survey participants said they had started researching, or shopping for, Medicare plans 12 months before they would turn 65.
A few years ago, about 40% of consumers would have reported shopping for Medicare plans 12 months before they turned 65, Dippel said.
