Why Regional Health Insurance Markets Require More Than a Bigger Sales Push
Regional and rural markets remain some of the most important growth opportunities for health plans and carriers These communities are often underserved and rely heavily on trusted local relationships. For many plans, they represent a meaningful path to stronger market presence, deeper member reach, and more durable growth. But growth in these markets is […]
What Health Plans Need to Fix Isn’t What Most People Think
What Health Plans Need to Fix Isn’t What Most People Think At Medicarians this year, one session stood out for a simple reason: It didn’t try to predict the future. It focused on what’s actually breaking today. Hosted by Brendan McLoughlin, the panel, “Health Plans on the Brink: When Giants Fall and Regionals Fight to […]
The Danger of “Good Enough” Technology that Normalizes Friction
Why “Good Enough” Front-Office Systems Quietly Stall Health Plan Growth For years, health plans have invested heavily in back-office systems. Claims, billing, compliance, and enrollment platforms are stable, mature, and deeply entrenched. And that’s the problem. Because while back offices are optimized for operational stability, growth happens somewhere else entirely. Growth happens in the front […]
From Managing Risk to Designing It Out: The System Architecture Advantage
Imagine this: Your compliance team just finished another 60-hour week reconciling commission data for CMS. They found the discrepancies (again). Fixed them (again). And they’ll do it all again next quarter. In our previous post, Invisible Risk: How Data Gaps Quietly Undermine Compliance, we explored how compliance risk actually forms from within health insurance distribution. […]
ACA & Medicaid Face a Major Shift in 2026: What Health Plans Must Do to Protect Growth
ACA & Medicaid Face a Major Shift in 2026: What Health Plans Must Do to Protect Growth This article is based on Episode #3 of Insuring Growth, featuring Dr. Makayla Lavender, Health Economist and Professor at UNLV. Open enrollment is about to get harder, not because demand is changing, but because the rules are. In […]
What We Heard at the NABIP California Innovation Expo: Data, Distribution, and the Future of Benefits
e123 was proud to serve as a platinum sponsor of the NABIP California Innovation Expo in San Diego in February 2026. e123 president Brendan McLoughlin spoke on the Innovation Panel alongside Dawn McFarland, President of CAHIP and agency owner at MNM Benefits, and Manuel Alcaine, Founder of ClaspAI, a benefits administration management platform. Together, they […]
Champion Health Plan’s Bold Approach to Medicare Advantage
Champion Health’s approach to thriving C-SNPs
Invisible Risk: How Data Gaps Quietly Undermine Compliance
The Most Dangerous Compliance Risks Are the Ones You Don’t See Coming Compliance failures rarely begin with a major mistake or a single bad decision. More often, they build up slowly inside day-to-day operations that feel manageable in the moment. It might be a spreadsheet, a reconciliation pushed to next week, or a report that’s […]
Health Plans Are Rebuilding Their Tech Stack Around Distribution, Not Homegrown Solutions
For years, health plans have relied on systems to manage distribution that were never designed for it. Sometimes those systems were off-the-shelf CRMs. More often, they were homegrown combinations of spreadsheets, legacy tools, and heavily customized software stitched together over time. These systems became the center of the tech stack not because they were the […]
Health Insurance Predictions for 2026: Less Margin for Error, Less Room for Guesswork
In our 2025 Year in Review, we saw clear signs that the economics of health plan growth were changing. This post looks at what those shifts mean heading into 2026 and where plans should expect conditions to tighten. Most of what will define 2026 is already in motion. Preparation will matter more than prediction. Premium […]