A few days ago, as I was talking with one of the employeebenefit brokers we work with, she commented that the benefitsbusiness has changed radically in the past few years. Think aboutit, she observed: When I started in the business we didn’t havePPACA to deal with, we didn’t communicate via texting, cell phoneswere a luxury and there was a very limited choice of voluntaryproducts. She concluded, “My business is completely differenttoday.”

That got me thinking about my focus on the voluntary business over almost 30 years. Do I think thebusiness has changed completely over that time? Has the value ofpast experience been overshadowed by the issues and technologies ofthe present?

The more I considered this question, the more it seemed to methat the fundamentals of the voluntary business have changedsurprisingly little over the past 30 years. What are thesefundamentals? Consider employers. The idea that employers want toprovide expanded benefits at little or no added cost has beenaround since the 1980s. Those who began selling voluntary benefitsin this era of HR-IS services will be interested to know that bythe mid-1980s, Section 125 services were routinely packaged withproducts, as were benefit statements revealing the hidden paycheckrepresented by benefits.

Products? In those days, most sales emphasis was on permanentand term life products but there were also disability incomeprotection plans, hospital indemnity plans, cancer/dread diseaseproducts and others. Today’s product portfolio of insured productsshows evolution and fine-tuning, for example, of hospital indemnityinto “mini-med” or cancer/dread disease products into today’scritical illness plans.

Employee enrollment? While today we use systems and technologyto promote enrollment opportunities for employees, enrollment inthe 1980s took every bit as much planning and communicationssupport as it does today.

The tools are more sophisticated, but the techniques and basictactics are the same: Employees need to be convinced how importantit is to consider their personal and family financial security andwant to be educated on available answers to these needs. Also inthe world of enrollment, we still struggle to convince employees topurchase voluntary products in competition with everyday expenses.In the 1980s we would say “this policy costs about the same perweek as a pack of cigarettes.” Today, we compare costs with agallon of gas. Finally, making employee enrollment as simple aspossible continues to be essential.

What has changed most is distribution. Today, voluntary plansare sold by a wide variety of carriers and many types ofdistributors to employers of all kinds across the country. In the1980s, distribution tended to be much more a specialists’ game,centered on enrollment companies and agents who sold for companiesbranded as “salary savings” or “payroll deduction” carriers. And,geographically, a preponderance of distributors and carriers in the1980s were in the southeast, where employers did not offer as broada range of paid benefits.