So did I get your attention? Or at least distract you enough so that you forgot there’s a carrier on the cover of this month’s issue?

So, what the hell, you might be thinking. Why would Storey put the president (and chief operating officer) of one of the biggest carriers in the business on the cover of a magazine that’s supposed to be for brokers. Not to mention a carrier long vilified by brokers for the way they do business…one some would argue represents everything that’s wrong with the carrier-broker relationship.

So it all started with a phone call more than a year ago. (Or was it two?)  I was scrambling —yeah, it was last minute—to lock down a closing speaker for our show when Aflac’s people and I flirted with the idea of putting the company’s president on the cover.

For a journalist, it’s quite a get. Whether it’s Aflac or Zurich, these carrier bigwig types never give us the time of day. I gotta better chance of getting my first ex-wife on the phone. So of course I jumped at the chance. (What can I say, I’m easy?) Besides, Aflac’s big push for a new broker relationship was just getting off the ground and I thought it was an important enough push that brokers needed to hear their side of the story.

Then talks got stuck on the back burner for months and as time wore on that story became less urgent. Mainly because it told itself. The campaign morphed into a real cultural shift down there in Georgia.

And as the economy wore on, the campaign heated up and reform settled in to stay, I suppose I got caught up in the bigger picture and it turned more into tale of two cultures—and no, carriers and brokers. It became about East vs. West and how maybe what we see across the other pond is more of a glimpse into our own future. Or at least a potential version of it. See if Aflac can do 75 percent of their business in a country that already has nationalized health care, it tells me that maybe our future’s not so dark here under a watered-down (some might say early) version of it here. I don’t know. I could be wrong. But I thought it was a question worth asking and a story worth telling.

Two more things, then I’ll let you get on with the issue. First, Aflac had absolutely zero control of this story (or the pictures that accompany it). I didn’t let them see a word (or pixel) of it before any of you did. Which leads to my final point: For those of you crying foul (or fowl) I’d be happy to go through last month’s buyers guide and spend the next several months letting every other major carrier president tell their story, too (just not in a row).

But only if you can work under the same conditions.