Illinois Group Health Insurance - Getting Soft Numbers

Are you a business owner that offers Illinois Group Health Insurance to your employees? If so, there is no doubt that you have at least on occasion gone out for a competitive quote. In this economy what smart business man or woman wouldn’t want to save a little money on health insurance if you could keep the same benefits in place or even improve on them a little. Has any agent actually taken the time to explain the process to you? If not, you should look for an agent that will put your needs first and their commissions check second.

Most agents will say I can get you some group health quotes; all I need from you is a census of the group. This is called getting "soft" numbers. Getting this type of quote is an absolute waste of time for most employers. It’s quick and easy but not worth the paper it’s printed on. If you’ve gone out for a quote you know why. These rates come back looking fantastic a lot of times. Then after deciding to go forward with that carrier you have your employees fill out the applications and the agent sends them into the carrier to be underwritten. If you have between 2 – 50 employees the carrier can rate your group up according to the health conditions that it has, this rate-up can be as high as 67%. This 67% rate-up is called by some the medical sir charge or medical rate-up factor. All of a sudden that first quote doesn’t look so good any more.

To make matters worse, when some agents find out that the company is getting competitive quotes from several different agents you wouldn’t believe the type of fudging that goes on. Let me put it to you this way. If you give the same census to 5 different agents you should get 5 quotes back that are identical from each individual carrier for that plan design. Has that been the case for your group in the past? I’ll bet not. If not, I promise you something has to be different. Quite often the census will get changed before arriving at the insurance carrier. Maybe 5 years was taken off everyone’s date of birth. Maybe they accidentally, on purpose, took a couple people off the census. That is just a couple of things that I’ve run up against in the past. So it is important for employers to know exactly how the process works so that they can separate the wheat from the shaft so to say. You need to find an agent that you can rely on and that will keep your interest first and foremost.

Randy Gillespie is the owner of Focus Insurance Group, specializing in Illinois Group Health Insurance. To learn more visit his site at FocusInsGroup.