The Catch: Nov. 3

BB&T Insurance Services is making another distribution deal in California.

BB&T Insurance Services, a unit of BB&T Corp., Winston-Salem, N.C. (NYSE:BBT) – a midsize regional bank holding company – has acquired F.B.P. Insurance Services Inc., Irvine, Calif., a benefits consulting and administration firm that does business as Precept Group.

Precept was founded in 1987. It services employers with 50 to 50,000 employees in 42 states.

BB&T is not saying how much it is paying for Precept, but it says it is adding 140 employees from Precept and an office in San Ramon, Calif., as well as the Precept office in Irvine.

Precept will continue to manage the Precept Consulting Services and ProView Benefits Administration Services businesses, BB&T says.

BB&T recently announced the acquisition of Liberty Benefit Insurance Services Inc., San Jose, Calif., a benefits brokerage firm that was founded in 1991.

BB&T entered California in June 2008 when it acquired the insurance services business of UnionBanCal Corp., San Francisco.

BB&T notes in a discussion of the Precept deal that, because of the new rules created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), employers want to spend more time talking with consultants about how they should run their benefit plans.

HOOKED

A few years ago, many publicly traded health insurers were rushing as fast as they could to get away from Medicare plus Choice, the predecessor to the Medicare Advantage, and vowing that they would never, ever get tangled up with government health plans again.

This quarter, of course, many health insurers are running their earnings calls as if they specialized solely in selling Medicare and Medicaid plans and had never thought about the commercial health insurance market.

Steve Zaharuk, a senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service, New York, writes in a commentary about a flurry of companies’ recent Medicare and Medicaid deals that they generally are “credit positive for purchasers.”