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AIS's Health Business Daily
Featured Story September 2, 2008 Aetna’s ‘Bodyguard’ Targets Young Adults; Includes Three Options Beginning as Low as $40 per Month Reprinted from HEALTH PLAN WEEK, the industry's leading source of business, financial and regulatory news of health plans, PPOs and POS plans. By Chris Meehan, Associate Editor, (cmeehan@aispub.com) At the end of last month, Aetna, Inc. introduced BodyGuard, a product line geared to young adults that features monthly premiums as low as $40, to its Illinois market. The insurer touts the new line as "easy-to-understand" insurance. The three options (Basic, Intermediate and Advanced) are available online as well as through brokers. An Aetna executive noted that the plans are limited in scope, but stopped short of calling them limited-benefit plans. Two of the options are high-deductible health plans (HDHPs), and the third has no deductible. They are an attempt by the plan to tap into the 19 million uninsured individuals in the U.S. who are between the ages of 18 and 34, a market also being eyed by many other health plans. The BodyGuard plans have fairly limited overall benefits but are still comprehensive, said Laurie Brubaker, chief operating officer for Aetna's Consumer Segment, during a July 30 AIS audioconference, "Benefit Design and Marketing for Individual Health Insurance Products: 'Life Stage' Strategies for Health Plans." She distinguishes BodyGuard from limited-benefits plans, contending that limited plans often offer just catastrophic coverage and don't cover the preventive care that's available in the three PPO-based BodyGuard plans. The plans also are guaranteed renewable, she said. Full-year deductibles for the plans range from $5,000 in the Basic option to zero in the Advanced option. Aetna did extensive research into what type of coverage the age group wanted, according to Brubaker. Subsequently, it focused on a "look-good, feel-good" approach to health insurance. The products offer fitness-club discounts and a dental benefit for $14 a month. She told listeners that the insurer's research showed that dental benefits were more important to the group than were benefits such as vision, smoking cessation and counseling. She also stressed the need for making the plans available online. The insurer launched a Web site, www.aetnabodyguard.com, specifically for the product. The company said it worked to make sure that the site is conversational, simple, concise and not patronizing. To that end, the site allows for side-by-side comparisons of the health plans and permits member personalization, she explained. Brubaker asserted that the company wanted to "make it clever and intriguing." She added, "The real challenge was making sure you built the technology for it and making sure it meets the needs [of the users]." Aetna said it will market the plan first in the Chicago area. And the launch includes "a major sponsorship of the Chicago Sport & Social Club, a networking organization with more than 70,000 participants that focuses on connecting active young adults in the Chicago area." The product also is being marketed to parents of young adults and those in the age group who do not have employer-sponsored coverage. Aetna wants to expand BodyGuard to other states within the next year, Brubaker said in response to a question. But the company would like to assess the portfolio's results over the first six months before making any such move. She declined to forecast initial sales of the product. Plans Try to Tap Under-30 Market States themselves also are trying to extend coverage options to the 18-to-30-year-old group. Sixteen states now require health plans to offer coverage to dependent children living in the state on their parents' policies until they are up to 30 years old in some states and until their mid-20s in others, according to The Washington Post. However, plans such as Aetna's BodyGuard or WellPoint, Inc.'s Tonik might still be less expensive than insuring an adult child on their parents' plan, especially if the parent's coverage could change to single or couple coverage from family coverage. The company is also
looking into the best approaches into how to market the product in coordination
with its student health area of business, Aetna spokesperson Ethan Slavin
tells HPW. |
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