At last year’s Benefits Selling Expo, there was a lot of talk about health reform and if it was going to really happen. After all, a year ago was before the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and before President Obama’s reelection ensured, yet again, the survival of his landmark law.

At this year’s Benefits Selling Expo, held in San Diego April 29-May 1, we found ourselves dealing with reform as the new reality. And it was one popular subject: Our magazine’s 2013 expo—our ninth show—was the biggest one yet with more than 1,000 attendees.

To explain the repercussions of reform, we had help from three big keynotes: Rick Santorum, the former GOP presidential candidate and senator from Pennsylvania; Ezra Klein, a columnist for the Washington Post and Bloomberg; and Karl Schoemer, founder and president of VisionQuest Solutions.

Of course, the dozens of breakout sessions helped, too.

And at the show, Aaron Davis, president of NextLogical Benefit Strategies in Westminster, Md., was named Benefits Selling’s 2013 Broker of the Year.

Here’s a recap of the keynotes, in case you missed it.

Embrace change

If you’ve been hunkered down, hoping all the changes to the benefits industry will calm down soon, you might want to grab a magazine or something.

Because according to Karl Schoemer, you’re going to be in for a long wait.

“The dust is never going to settle,” Schoemer, founder and president of VisionQuest Solutions, told the audience at Benefits Sellng Expo’s opening keynote presentation. “For those who are waiting for things to go back to the way they were in the good old days, it’s never going to happen.”

In fact, more changes are coming, and they’re going to be faster and bigger than the last ones, Schoemer said. The pace of technology innovations, the speed and amount of information available today and the world’s rapidly expanding population basically guarantee it.

So what’s a broker to do? “We’re past the point of managing change,” Schoemer said.

“We’re at the point where we need to seize change and use it to our advantage. We’ve got to figure out where all this change is headed and start working on the qualities, skills and behaviors that will make us marketable and employable in a radically different world.”

Doing that means recognizing the dynamics of change. On an individual level, change can often create a sense of loss among an industry’s employees. Trust deteriorates, and employees go into self-preservation mode, thinking they’ll just ride out a certain manager or a sure-to-fail organizational change. But that’s the worst thing to do, Schoemer said.

“You’re being challenged every day to raise your hand, to solve problems,” he said. “If you’re not doing that, if you’re in self-preservation mode, you’re in the riskiest place you can be.”

At the organizational level, change can often result in a loss of momentum as well as key talent, as communication breaks down and morale suffers. Those setbacks, though, aren’t good indicators of whether the change is worthwhile or not.

“If you are using these factors to determine whether or not you’re on the right road, you’re using the wrong measurements,” Schoemer said. “You will never make everybody happy. Stop trying. Change, don’t change. Someone’s still going to be unhappy.”

The better reaction, Schoemer said, is to do exactly the opposite.

Embrace changes immediately and you’ll be able to adapt to them—and adjust to any detrimental effects—quickly. The faster you recover, the better you’ll be able to weather the next change, and the next, and the next.

“You don’t get to control the pace of change,” Schoemer said. “So if you’re going to fail, do it fast.”

This ability to adapt to change is going to become—more than brand or reputation or size—the key to what sets a successful company apart from its competitors.

“Traditional advantages, like price, quality and service, are going away,” Schoemer said. “That’s just the price of admission these days. Customers today are asking ‘What have you done for me lately?’ and then, ‘What will you do for me tomorrow?’”

Santorum urges fight

Some say it’s time for the benefits industry to accept Obamacare—passed by Congress, signed by President Obama, upheld by the Supreme Court—as law.

Rick Santorum is not one of those people.

“I read this morning that someone here was saying, ‘Give up on Obamacare, you can’t do anything to repeal it,’” said Santorum, a keynote speaker at the Benefits Selling Expo April 30. “Baloney. Since when do we say, ‘Well, it’s going to happen, might as well give up’?”

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator and a GOP presidential candidate in the 2012 election, pointed to Obamacare as a transformative event for the country. The law will fundamentally change Americans’ relationship with their government, he said, and not for the better.

“People are going to now rely on the government in some way for their health insurance,” he said. “And once government has its hand on you, it’s not a matter of you being dependent. It’s a matter of the government having control over you.”

And despite the government intervention, Obamacare will do little to actually improve health care and its costs, Santorum predicted. Giving everyone an insurance card doesn’t mean they’ll be able to afford all the care they need—or, given the nation’s looming primary care doctor shortage, even find it.

“There’s something about an insurance card that makes people feel comfortable, whether it means you can get care or not,” he said.

So, according to Santorum, it’s time for Americans, especially those in industries most affected by Obamacare, to fight back.

“As an industry, to sit back and let the government do this to you, I have three words for you: Shame on you,” he said. “Who’s going to fight for your clients if you don’t? What are you afraid of? You’re going to lose your job anyway if this thing goes into fruition. Go down swinging.

Santorum asked audience members how many came from a state where the governor or legislature had refused to implement Obamacare. Several dozen hands went up.

But when he asked how many of those people had talked to their lawmakers about the decision, most of the hands went back down. That’s the problem, Santorum said.

“They need to hear from you—your congressmen, your legislators,” he said. “If you support what they’re doing, tell them. Because I can guarantee they’re already hearing from the people who don’t.”

Will Santorum be one of those elected leaders again anytime soon? When asked whether he would run for president again, Santorum said only that he was considering his options.

“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s really hard on the family, and that’s the biggest nut for me. When someone asks me if I’m running, my answer is that I’m walking. I’m just walking the right path to see what I can do that’s best for my family and my country.”

Klein warns of more gridlock

If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that Republicans are against Obamacare.

Except that, according to Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein, they’re really not.

“If McCain had won the 2008 elections, we’d still be talking about a health care reform bill right now, with all the same provisions,” he told the audience at his Benefit Selling Expo keynote presentation April 30. “The only thing different would be we’d be calling it McCainCare.”

Chalk it up to politics. Klein posits that Democrats and Republicans (who introduced a precursor to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the 1990s) mostly agree when it comes to health care policy. What they’re really fighting about is power.

“A lot of the fights we have about policy in Washington are really just about who wins the next election,” he said. “Washington’s a much weirder place than we give it credit for.”

Unfortunately, election-driven policy stances don’t usually make for great policy, Klein said. And exhibit A is the PPACA.

If Obamacare lived in a nonpartisan world, “2014 should be the year it rolls out and we figure out what goes right and fix whatever goes wrong,” Klein said.

But we live in the real world, where 2014 is an election year. Republicans are hoping an Obamacare failure helps them ride to victory in the midterms; Democrats are hoping for the opposite. It’s a situation that doesn’t exactly breed compromise, Klein said.

“What we could end up with, rather than a good Affordable Care Act or no Affordable Care Act is just a badly implemented Affordable Care Act,” Klein said. “And that’s what I worry about.”

That leaves a lot of uncertainty about health care in Washington as well in the rest of the nation. “Anyone who’s being definitive to you about health care right now is lying,” he said.

And clarity isn’t likely to come any time soon. Because in addition to PPACA, the two parties also are divided on the future of Medicare, the likely subject of the next health care-related battle in Congress, Klein said.

Republicans want to privatize the program and let the free market go to work, while Democrats want to expand it and use its purchasing power to drive down costs. See the problem?

“The difficult thing about those two positions is that there’s no compromise between them,” Klein said. “You can’t split the difference. I worry that we’re just looking at true and fundamental gridlock in Washington. It’s very hard to see, in the short term, how we move forward with health care.”

Photographs by Tony Amat

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Post show report: Benefits Selling Expo 2013

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