Featured Post: AARP Is Very Busy Lately

AARP - American Association of Retired Persons - is one of this nation’s largest retiree resource for information, insurance and a plethora of other items. It has also one of the largest lobbying forces in the country. As our population is aging at a rate faster than we have ever seen, AARP will be even more busy in trying to provide products and services to the masses.

Last week, information was made available that AARP had partnered with Aetna and UnitedHealthcare to design and make available a medical program for people ages 50-64 - this would be the pre-retiree population. The arguement was that this group is difficult to get health insurance for (usually individual underwriting makes it difficult for anyone that has ever sneezed to get insurance and most plans aren’t covering early retirees or retirees at all and they are too young for medicare). Facing all of those issues, AARP wants to help that portion of the popultion find health insurance programs.

Frankly, there are a lot of people that need to be able to find, be eligible for and pay for health insurance. I find it interesting that the nation’s two largest Medicare Supplement plans, Aetna and Secure Horizon’s, is offering to do this with AARP. They are doing this for one reason - to find people for thier medicare supp plans early. If they can get them in at 50, then they might stay through the rest of thier years. It is a great business play but I don’t think that we should be thinking that they are just doing this out of the goodness of thier heart.

This might create some issues for business as well. Will companies want to carve out this portion of thier population to reduce the impact that this group has on rates? Current laws would prevent that but don’t think that this wouldn’t change if there was enough pressue on the State and Federal gov’t to do this. There are a lot of workplace changes that will be going on over the next 10 years and how we integrate an older employee into our corporate culture will be interesting. (that’s Thursday’s topic)

Helping people find health coverage at an affordable price will continue to be an issue and frankly, a challenge for years to come. Let’s just be cautious and understand the pros and cons before getting on the bandwagon.

Don’t be foolish and naive like I was. I went years without shopping around my insurance rates, and one day it dawned on me.. All I had to do was take 5 minutes and get some free quotes and boy, did I ever save some major $$