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Life Health > Health Insurance > Health Insurance

5 ways to ease benefits buyers’ PPACA daze

By Allison Bell

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You’re trying to sell non-medical health benefits. The prospects’ eyes glaze over. Perhaps the prospects herd into seminars about the new health care law looking like zombies from “The Walking Dead.”

You have not watched “The Walking Dead” and know whatever tactics used against zombies in that are probably inappropriate in a sales context.

What do you do?

Here are five suggestions.

Desperate hands

1. Be gentle.

Remember that benefits buyers might be disoriented and irritable this year because of all of the nights they have spent reading PPACA regulations and trying to convert the regulations into English.

HealthCare.gov

2. Connect your topic with PPACA.

If clients think the world revolves around PPACA, anyway, consider catering to that view by emphasizing how a benefit intersects with PPACA.

Enter the house of PPACA mirrors inside the clients’ mind and frame your conversation as a discussion of “Dental insurance in PPACA World,” “Disability insurance in PPACA World,” or “Some other topic in PPACA World,” so that your statements get through the mental filters that now shut remarks about other topics out of the clients’ consciousness.

Count on the clients’ instinctive reflex to gravitate toward advice about PPACA to pull the clients in your direction.

 Dr. Wellness

3. Highlight any effects a non-medical health benefit has on wellness.

Employers may understand that PPACA encourages use of carefully designed wellness programs, and they may continue to have a vague memory that holding down claims by improving employees’ health is a good thing to do for its own sake, regardless of what PPACA requires.

 Confusion

4. Remind employers that PPACA is just one of a number of federal health reform laws, and help them understand that there may be entire universes of non-PPACA health reform regulations and guidance that they may have overlooked.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a health reform act.

The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) is a health reform act.

Maybe you can help clients see that they should be looking at their benefits programs, such as any employee assistance programs, in the light of HIPAA and MHPAEA compliance as well as PPACA compliance.

 The zombie wakes up

5. Keep talking about the value of the non-medical health products you offer, clearly and concisely, over and over again.

Make sure you’re there explaining the value of the benefits when the clients look around and suddenly realize that they are hungry for information about something other than PPACA.

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