A few days ago, as I was talking with one of the employee benefit brokers we work with, she commented that the benefits business has changed radically in the past few years. Think about it, she observed: When I started in the business we didn’t have PPACA to deal with, we didn’t communicate via texting, cell phones were a luxury and there was a very limited choice of voluntary products. She concluded, “My business is completely different today.”

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

The more I considered this question, the more it seemed to me that the fundamentals of the voluntary business have changed surprisingly little over the past 30 years. What are these fundamentals? Consider employers. The idea that employers want to provide expanded benefits at little or no added cost has been around since the 1980s. Those who began selling voluntary benefits in this era of HR-IS services will be interested to know that by the mid-1980s, Section 125 services were routinely packaged with products, as were benefit statements revealing the hidden paycheck represented by benefits.