PPACA exchange season: Brokers respond

Many agents and brokers question whether the government should be running the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) public exchange system.

Many question whether the government is cut out to run a health insurance exchange system.

But few question whether the exchange system is a marketing force to be reckoned with.

The glitch-plagued exchanges run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and various state-based organization offer moderate-income consumers access to PPACA premium subsidies that can cut the enrollee’s share of the cost of major medical coverage to pennies per day. At ACASignups.net, Charles Gaba has estimated that the public exchange system may have persuaded almost 10 million Americans to sign up for coverage, and about 8.2 million to pay for coverage.

The exchange system is getting ready to start its second annual open enrollment period Nov. 15, and many producers are launching campaigns that tie in to the hoopla the public exchanges hope to generate.

Earlier, we looked at an early tie-in TV commercial.

Here’s a look at some of the Web-based open enrollment tie-in marketing efforts now operating out in the field.

1. Some of the key battlegrounds are in Google and Bing search results.

One way to track the tie-in campaigns is to plug search terms such as “health insurance exchange” or “health insurance marketplace” into search engines such as Google.com, Bing.com and DuckDuckGo.com.

At Google, for example, big health insurers and the exchanges themselves have claimed most of the slots on the first page of results.

But two brokers and referral services showed up in a list of paid ads in the right-hand column on Friday, and six paid ads by brokers and referral services showed up in another list of results generated Monday.

One New York firm, Healthfirst Inc., has come up with a search result strategy based on an old-school touch: It promises it will have “knowledgeable specialists give you a call.”