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Hey, Pugs...Here come the success stories!
Ezra Klein: In all of 2012, health insurers spent $216 million advertising on local television stations. But that's nothing compared to what they're about to spend. According to trade association TVB, insurers will spend more than $500 million on local television ads in 2014. And that's to say nothing of cable television ads and social media campaigns.
Insurers look at these next few years as a gold rush. Tens of millions of people will be buying private insurance of the exchanges. It's a swarm of customers like nothing they've ever seen. And they plan to capture them -- even if they need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do so.
The Wall Street Journal reports that WellPoint has been holding off "on a planned campaign as problems with the website made it impossible for many consumers to sign up." But now that HealthCare.Gov is more or less working the insurance giant plans to spend $100 million by the end of the year.
These ads aren't just a boon to local television stations. They're a boon to the new health law which'll be promoted in a sustained ad campaign that rivals the presidential election in size and scale. The ads won't be specifically about Obamacare, of course -- they're about brand building for WellPoint and Cigna and others insurers -- but many of the ads will tell consumers where they can go to buy this wonderful product they've just heard such glowing things about. Many of the ads will capture the eye of someone who knows they need to buy insurance before tax time but hasn't quite gotten around to doing it. And then it will direct them to their local exchange, or at least to their insurer's Web site.
The fact that the insurers are launching their campaigns is also independent confirmation that HealthCare.Gov is rapidly improving. major insurers are virtually the only group aside from the federal government that has real visibility into the functioning of Obamacare's digital architecture. They know what the pace of enrollment looks like, and how many 834s are being correctly generated, and whether angry customers are calling their help lines. They know there are still problems even if the Obama administration is downplaying them. But if they think the system is sound enough to begin driving people to it that's good evidence that the improvements are real.
Top story: How much progress can Obamacare make in 2014?Health insurers are cranking up ad spending, a sign that they believe Obamacare may be ready to work. "[W]ith website access improving and the initial deadline to sign up for coverage looming Dec. 23, insurers are starting to blanket the airwaves and social media with glitzy ads urging consumers to buy their plans. WellPoint Inc. --which has held off for weeks on a planned campaign as problems with the website made it impossible for many consumers to sign up-- said it expects to spend up to $100 million by the end of this year on TV, social media and print ads targeting mostly young and healthy people...Insurers such as WellPoint are capitalizing on an unprecedented opportunity in a shifting health-care market. Some seven million Americans are expected to buy health coverage on the new consumer exchanges, where people can compare insurance plans side by side...The ad campaigns are a major shift in strategy for health insurers, most of whom have never really had to market directly to consumers aggressively until now. Most in the past sold plans to companies and human-resource directors for their workforces." Timothy W. Martin in The Wall Street Journal.
How much progress has there been, exactly, on Healthcare.gov? "Insurers said that they had found many discrepancies and errors and that the government was overstating the improvements in HealthCare.gov. In some instances, they said, the federal government reported that the home address for a new policyholder was outside an insurer's service area. In other cases, a child was listed as the main subscriber -- the person responsible for paying premiums -- and parents were listed as dependents. In some cases, children were enrolled in a policy by the federal government and parents were left off, or vice versa. In other cases, the government mixed up the members of a family: A child or spouse was listed two or three times in the same application in late November. Such errors can have financial implications, increasing the amount of premiums that a family is required to pay." Robert Pear in The New York Times.
