How Health Plans Can Better Support FMOs and Agencies
Field marketing organizations (FMOs) and agencies play a major role in how health plans grow. They help plans reach new markets, activate agent networks, support enrollment, and build stronger relationships with brokers and members. For Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, D-SNP, individual market plans, and other health insurance products, these partner relationships can be a significant growth […]
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 […]
How High-Performing Health Plans Are Optimizing Their Insurance Sales Distribution in 2026
The health insurance market is rapidly changing. Premium pressure, regulatory complexity, broker consolidation, and rising administrative costs are not new conversations for health plan leaders. They are the operating reality. What separates plans that grow in this environment from those that stall is not strategy alone. It’s execution. And execution lives inside distribution operations. Growth […]
The Growth Bottleneck No One Talks About
Health Plans Are Optimized for Operations, Not for Growth When I talk with health plan leaders, I hear a familiar frustration: growth feels harder than it should. The instinct is to blame the market. Sometimes it’s regulation, other times it’s the competition. But in my experience, the real issue is internal. Most health plans are […]
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 […]
How Better Data Turns Policy Chaos Into Strategic Advantage
Every health insurance leader knows the moment. Open enrollment ends. January begins, and suddenly the questions arrive faster than the answers: Why don’t these enrollment numbers match? Which products actually performed, and where? Why are commissions still being reconciled weeks later? Can we trust what we’re seeing? This is when growth stops feeling exciting and […]
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 […]