U.S. Insurance Exchanges and Senior Consumers

1 FINANCIAL SBILITY AT ION NEWSLETTER HEALTH AND AGEING U.S. Insurance Exchanges and Senior Consumers by Steve Woods+ and Marcy Updike++ With the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010, Americans were introduced to a relatively new way to purchase health insurance, the online exchange. By “exchange,” for the purpose of this article, we mean a virtual shopping area in which individuals or employees of a company can research and then purchase an insurance product online that best suits their individual needs. Exchanges can be either public or private; even though they both offer the ability to choose and purchase insurance, they have a few distinct differences. A public exchange is managed by the federal or a state government and only offers health insurance to individuals or small employers at this time. A private exchange is managed by a benefit broker, employee consultant or another private benefit-related firm. Unlike a public exchange, a private exchange is only utilised at the workplace and can offer other insurance products in addition to health insurance. Figure 1: Evolution of number of baby-boomer retirees by 2050 No. 33 October 2015 + Marcy Updike is the Research Center Director and Vice President of Market Research for Gen Re’s North America Life/Health business unit. She is responsible for providing project design and management leadership for a variety of industry and ad hoc studies serving the Life and Health industry. She can be reached at mupdike@genre.com ++ Steve Woods is a Vice President and Senior Account Executive for Gen Re in Portland, Maine. His primary responsibilities are new business development and client relationships for the Medicare Supplement line of business. He can be reached at steve.woods@genre.com Facebook Users 71% Use social networking sites 70% 31% Twitter Users 7% Instagram Users LinkedIn Users 25% In just 15 years, by 2030, all the baby boomers will be age 65 and over … & This means they will reach retirement age at a rate of 10,000 per day. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012 Population Estimates and 2012 National Projections. @TheGenevaAssoc HEALTH AND AGEING